[LLVMdev] RFC: Instrumentation based profiling file libraries

[Justin Bogner]

Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google.com> writes:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Justin Bogner <mail at justinbogner.com> wrote:
>
>> - This library could either be (A) a standalone library for reading and
>>   writing the instrumentation based profiling format, or (B) a library
>>   that includes readers and writers for various profiling formats.
>>   Notably, (B) would make it a good place for a sample based profile
>>   reader, which currently lives in lib/Transforms with its usage.
>
> Agreed. Option (B) seems like the best alternative.
>
>> - If we go with (A), a name like Profile may be too generic, so something
>>   more specific like InstrProfile might be better. For (B), Profile or
>>   ProfileData seem best.
>
> Either Profile or ProfileData sounds good to me. Slight preference for
> ProfileData. I could move the reader code from
> lib/Transforms/SampleProfile into this library, which could then be
> used into standalone sample profile readers/validators/converters.

ProfileData sounds good.

> Where do you envision having the standalone tools?  Say a converter
> from one profile format to another, or a writer tool. Some tools will
> have slightly more twisted dependencies (converting from Perf data,
> for example requires quite a bit of other code).

For now I think it makes sense to just treat these as other llvm tools.
That is, they can independently go in tools/, and depend on the profile
library and whatever else they need.