Tracy Profiler Integration

[Alexandru Ermicioi]

On Thursday, 13 August 2020 at 00:32:34 UTC, Stefan Koch wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 August 2020 at 14:51:08 UTC, Alexandru 
> Ermicioi wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Looked at source code, and wondered, is it possible to have an 
>> abstraction layer between tracy and injected code?
>>
>> That way we could eliminate tracy depenedency from dmd, and 
>> move it into a library solution, which would then allow us to 
>> replace tracy woth other tools if needed. It also would allow 
>> preprocessing if needed before event would be sent to tracy 
>> server.
>
> I am not sure what you are talking about.
> There is no dependency between dmd and tracy.
>
> Are you talking about providing a general profiling interface?
> That might be possible but outside of the scope what I am 
> trying to do right now.
> Also keep in mind that the number of layers between the 
> profiler and the profiled application diminish the usefulness.
>
> To be honest having to link with a library to use tracy already 
> sucks.
> I'd rather inject all the profiling code verbatim, but that's 
> too involved at the moment.

There is in your comparison between compiled binary, tracy client 
and dmd, a hardcoded one (linking tracy client, and injecting 
calls to tracy client in binary in semantic3 visitor of dmd). If 
you make a *thin* abstraction between tracy client and dmd, you 
may move tracy client dependency to druntime instead of dmd, and 
hide it by a version switch if needed. Then you won't need any 
-tracy flag in dmd itself, just standard profiling switch. D user 
would also be able to switch to whatever profiling agent he'd 
like by providing their own implementation in custom druntime, 
which would be a lot easier than modifying actual dmd to add 
support for their profiler. This is also in trend of moving 
compiler magic into a library solution btw.

Also tracy is client-server application, right? You'll still 
require some lib or implementation of tracy client side to 
communicate with server, so I'm not sure what do you mean by 
injecting profiling code verbatim.

- Alex