(To those CC'd, you all either maintain or have at some point written
a Perl coverage tool or profiler).
As part of the QA process we need to do alot of test coverage analysis
and, to a lesser extent, performance profiling. Our existing tools
(Devel::Coverage, Devel::DProf, Devel::SmallProf) are a start, but
need alot of work. We need really solid, tested, documented libraries
*and* tools to pull this off.
Now, it strikes me that a profiler is just a coverage tool that also
records times, and a coverage tool is just a profiler that doesn't.
As such, I'd like the bunch of you to put your heads together and
share tips, tricks and problems encountered creating your creations to
hopefully improve the whole state of the art. Hooking into the
debugger is something of a Black Art and it could use some airing out.
This *doesn't* mean that I'm advocating a single, monolithic
profiler/coverage tool. Keep your seperate implementations (or merge
them, doesn't matter).
We don't need fancy features, the most important things to improve are
1) Documentation and 2) Reliability. All the tools are historically
lacking on those fronts. I'm already doing a bit of work on
Devel::Coverage.
Share and enjoy!
