Apple Instruments for scientific application development

By jmazo at Thu, Jun 5 2008 11:14am |

Hi there
we received a couple a fine macs here at the lab, and I saw this instruments thing which looks nice. All our code here is C and C++ with MPI so...

My question is. Is Instruments a fine tool for that?
does anyone have any experience and willing to share it?

I'm asking this because I was reading the docs and Instruments seems to be very Obj-c oriented.

we all here are used to gdb/valngrind, and hoping to pickup Dtrace

Thanks in advance

‹ programming languages / frameworks / tools Suggestion for a New Mac User ›
Wed, 2008-06-11 22:12 — iollmann

Shark is what I use. It is

Shark is what I use. It is very easy to use, one button operation and lets your analyze both what routines and what parts of routines are using the most time, and look at how your app interacts with the system in the system trace utility. I am certain that Instruments is most excellent. I just started with Shark and have seen no reason to switch. I am extremely happy with it.

/Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/Shark.app

Thu, 2008-06-12 08:53 — ghutchis

Instruments works with C and C++ Too

One benefit of Instruments over Shark is that you can see the flow of memory, load, etc. in real-time. So you can correlate memory spikes with behavior.

The documentation is very Obj-C oriented because a large number of Mac developers use Objective-C. The program is not limited to that programming language.

Just give Instruments a try with your program -- load in some tracks and see what happens. I found it much more useful to actually try Instruments than to read the documentation.