Arc Forum | Profiling?

Arc Forum

7 points by abstractbill 5931 days ago | 4 comments

I remember reading this in "Arc at 3 Weeks" and being quite excited about it:

The Scheme language sneakily increased the scope of the language designer's powers. From very early, maybe from the begining, the Scheme spec said that conforming implementations must do tail call elimination. The first time I read this, I thought "wait, can you require this in a spec?" Arc will see this increase, and raise it by some standards for profiling.

I thought that was a great idea. Too few languages have good support for profiling. Did the idea get dropped? I don't see anything obviously related in arc.arc or in the tutorial.

2 points by cje 5931 days ago | link

Since there isn't a standard yet, there's no spec to have dropped the idea from. Still, I doubt the idea's been dropped -- it's too good an idea.

Hopefully, somebody will contribute a profiler before long, and fill this unfortunate gap.

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6 points by rcoder 5931 days ago | link

You can use the built-in MzScheme profiling tools; just run '(time (tl))' instead of '(tl)' to start the Arc REPL. You'll want some way to force a return from the toplevel interpreter, which may mean writing a shutdown routine for the web listener that doesn't require Ctrl-C halting the server thread, but that should be easy enough to do.

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1 point by elibarzilay 5930 days ago | link

MzScheme has a better profiling facility (the errortrace collection), but using it without source information is not too helpful. It is possible to do that (and I have a patch that does it), but it's not a quick solution.

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1 point by treef 5931 days ago | link

i dont think profiling a thing on top of thing is that good of an idea. I am still waiting for a native interpreter. There is some code analysis functions.

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