[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: hpapi 0.1 release

I am pleased to announce the first release of hpapi, Performance API (PAPI) bindings for Haskell. The release is on Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hpapi The source repository is at: http://code.haskell.org/hpapi/ Please send bug reports to <adamsmd [AT] cs.indiana.edu> What is it ========== This is a simple set of bindings for the Performance API (PAPI). PAPI provides access to various CPU counters such as cache-miss, instruction and pipeline stall counts. The easiest way to use this library is the withCounts function: withCounts :: [EventCode] -> IO a -> IO (a, [Integer]) Given a list of events to count and an IO operation it will run the operation and return the resulting counts. So you could do something like: main = do [l1,tlb,fp] <- withCounters [papi_l1_dcm, papi_tlb_dm, papi_fp_ins] ioOperationToMeasure printLn (l1, tlb, fp) To use it one will of course need the PAPI C library and any necessary kernel modifications installed. Status ====== The High Level interface (which will be sufficient for most people's needs) should be usable, but the low level interface is still alpha quality. That is to say, it is ready for people to start banging on it, but it is largely untested and the modules/interfaces may be reorganized based on user feedback. All of PAPI is supported with the exception of the following "advanced" features: - Multiplexing - Threads - Locks - Overflow - Statistical Profiling Future Directions ================= Future directions will be determined largely by user feedback. Principal areas that I am looking for feedback on are: - documentation - module organization - the handling of PAPI errors (currently it throws an IO error) - the design of the Haskell interface build on top of the C level PAPI_get_opt and PAPI_set_opt - what advanced features of PAPI to build bindings for next Comparison with GHC's built-in PAPI =================================== GHC supports a built-in version of PAPI (see http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/PAPI). This system is different in a few ways. First, hpapi allows you to measure specific parts of a program while GHCI's PAPI only does whole program measurement Second, since hpapi is a library you can have fine grained and sophisticated control over how things are measured. On the other hand GHC's PAPI as part of the RTS gives you less control, but on the plus side doesn't require any modification to the program. Finally, GHC's PAPI splits apart the counts that come from the garbage collector from those that come from the mutator, while hpapi combines them. This is a limitation of hpapi we hope to correct some time in the future. It remains to be seen whether it would be worth while to unify these two systems. ================ Bug reports as well as suggestions, feedback or contributions to the API or the documentation most welcome. Michael D. Adams