Re: Profiler: Interactive exploration of hierarchical profile

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 22 September 2011 14:56, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> wrote:

> here are two change-sets.  The first one, total.diff, just adds a
> field for "total time" to the hierarchical profiler output.  (I think
> this might be a valuable addition.)

Thanks, this is useful. I've briefly tested them and pushed them,
along with a minor documentation improvement.

    http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/graph/c5ddb99ff5de

It may make sense to move these to their own directory under scripts
if you foresee there will be more m-files for the profiler.

> The second one, profexplore.diff, adds a new function: profexplore.
> Called like
>
>  profexplore (profile ('info'))
>
> , this opens an interactive prompt that allows "exploration" of the
> hierarchical call-tree.  Type 'help' on the prompt for the supported
> commands.

I don't want to be too critical, so I will use someone else's drawings
to voice my concerns:

    http://notinventedhe.re/on/2010-1-19
    http://notinventedhe.re/on/2010-1-20

I think a profiler is a prime example of something that could be made
to work nicely from the GUI. I didn't find your interface too hard to
use, however. It would be nice if the data were aligned like the table
from profshow. It's a good *first* implementation, but we really do
need to think about how to make this work well from other frontends
(the GUI or Emacs or whatever).

- Jordi G. H.