Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 17:05:23 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Andrew Crabtree <andrewc AT typhoon DOT rose DOT hp DOT com>
cc: ao950 AT freenet DOT carleton DOT ca, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: New PGCC version available
In-Reply-To: <199706031343.AA100525409@typhoon.rose.hp.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970603165947.314C-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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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.