<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I am pleased to announce the first release of prof2dot, a graphical profiling tool</div><div>for use with GHC.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>While GHC has in the past worked with graphical profiling tools, they </div><div>have been heavyweight and/or proprietary. Prof2dot is a simple tool for</div><div>converting profiling information into a graphical format, released under a BSD3</div><div>license. It is simple because it offloads all of the work of rendering the graph</div><div>onto Graphviz. So you need to install the Graphviz tools in order to use it.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>The program is a filter that takes the profiling output generated by running</div><div>a GHC-compiled program with the "+RTS -px -RTS" option and turns it into</div><div>a dot file. (The "dot" format is a textual representation of a directed or undirected graph.)</div><div>The dot file can rendered in any format supported by Graphviz's</div><div>dot program, and the file itself can be post-processed or edited to adjust the</div><div>layout.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Features of prof2dot:</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* display either the call graph (default) or the call tree,</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* colorize by cost center count, time or allocations,<br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* group cost centers in the same module.<br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Prof2dot installs as a typical caballized application.</div><div>Running "prof2dot -?" from the command line will give a short summary of</div><div>how to use the program and its options.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Rendering very large graphs can exceed the internal resource limits of dot.</div><div>You may have to compile your own version of the Graphviz tools with higher limits</div><div>to handle these cases.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>A example of a colorized profile of a medium sized project is shown on our</div><div>company's web site: ht<a href="http://antiope.com/downloads.html">tp://antiope.com/downloads.html</a>. Click on the small</div><div>image to download a pdf of the complete profile graph.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Prof2dot is available from hackage or the link given above.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>-Greg</div></body></html>