Feature-Specific Profiling

TL;DR

Feature-specific profiling is a technique that helps programmers identify which language features cause performance issues, improving debugging and optimization of high-level language programs.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel feature-specific profiling approach, providing a new way to analyze and debug performance issues related to language features.

Findings

Effective in identifying expensive language features

Prototype implementations demonstrate practical usefulness

Empirical evidence supports general applicability

Abstract

While high-level languages come with significant readability and maintainability benefits, their performance remains difficult to predict. For example, programmers may unknowingly use language features inappropriately, which cause their programs to run slower than expected. To address this issue, we introduce feature-specific profiling, a technique that reports performance costs in terms of linguistic constructs. Feature-specific profilers help programmers find expensive uses of specific features of their language. We describe the architecture of a profiler that implements our approach, explain prototypes of the profiler for two languages with different characteristics and implementation strategies, and provide empirical evidence for the approach's general usefulness as a performance debugging tool.