On 1/25/2015 8:33 PM, Mikael Persson wrote:
Hi boost developers and users,
I just wanted to announce a recent development in my little pet-project, which is Templight: a template instantiation profiling tool based on Clang. I think that many of you would be interested in experimenting with it because many boost libraries are great examples of template-heavy libraries and many maintainers, developers and users might be interested in gathering data and diagnosing the real compilation costs (in time and memory) of various components of Boost.
Templight is a Clang-based profiler that can act as a drop-in replacement (e.g., in cmake) for the clang compiler, with the addition of generating a complete trace of the template instantiation history with associated time and memory (optional) costs. This allows you to see not only how deeply recursive certain template instantiations are, but also identify which instantiations the compiler spends the most time or memory on. It is basically to meta-programming what a run-time profiler is to ordinary code.
The templight profiler itself has reached a fairly stable state. It works at least under Linux and Windows (through "templight-cl.exe", which is a drop-in replacement for "clang-cl.exe", which is compatible with MSVC "cl.exe"), but probably works wherever clang works. Which means that you are welcome to try it. I have also used it successfully to build a few cmake-based projects (by setting CC and CXX environment variables to point to templight). Templight is currently also used in the back-end of the "metashell" project as well (an interactive shell interpreter and debugger for C++ template meta-programs). You can build the templight profiler against the clang source (with a patch + some added code), as it instructs on the github readme:
What is to keep clang from changing the files which templight patches or the llvm/tools/clang/tools/CMakeLists.txt which I am instructed to manually change. Is there a valid place to further discuss templight if I have problems ?
But most recently, I have created a separate set of tools to convert templight trace files to other formats. The most awesome of these outputs is the "callgrind" output, which produces a "meta-"call-graph, that is similar to (and in the same format as) call-graphs generated by run-time profiling tools like callgrind, but the profiling data is, of course, related to the compilation costs (time / memory). That conversion tool is available here:
https://github.com/mikael-s-persson/templight-tools
With that, you can open the converted templight trace files in the visualization tool KCacheGrind, which is great (works both on unix-like systems and Windows, thanks to Qt5). Here is a screenshot of that for one of Boost.Container's example programs:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mikael-s-persson/templight-tools/master/im...
I really hope that some of you will give this a try. I'm really hoping that it will be useful to you, and that you can provide feedback and feature requests. I couldn't think of any better target audience for this tool.