Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/06/03/10:15:35
On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Andrew Crabtree wrote:
> The new GCC comes with a new profiling program called gcov (gnu coverage).
AFAIK, `gcov' is not a profiling tool. It is a program that shows you
the coverage (hence its name) of your program's code by the recent
run(s). Using it, you can tell which parts of your code has never been
executed (due to combination of if's that never fired), and devise test
cases which will excercise these code fragments (since code that has
never been tested tends to have bugs). `gcov' generates a report which
shows how many times was each line executed, which might give you some
idea about where the hot spots might be. However, since execution counts
doesn't necessarily coincide with CPU time usage, it is not really a
profiler, and is not meant to be one.
- Raw text -