assembly/profiling question

[Henry Cejtin]

The  problem is (almost certainly) that you can't use an external symbol in a
negative context.  I.e., all uses of externals must be external+constant.

If you want to profile allocation  (which  you  can't  do  if  you  are  also
profiling  run time since it would skew the times) then wouldn't it be easier
to just add one extra word allocated which  had  the  program  counter?   I'm
thinking that the GC would first do a scan of the old space and write out the
data.  Maybe this is more trouble.

Ah, how about this technique (a bit  more  expensive  run-time  wise):  every
allocation point (or function, or what ever granularity you want) allocates a
counter which also has a  link  field.   Then  allocation  (or  entering  the
allocation  region)  consists of         if link NULL:                 link =
start of list of used bins                 start of used bins  =  my  counter
The  result  is  that on exit you have a linked list of all the counters that
were used.

I seem to recall that some scheme like  this  is  what  gprof  uses  for  its
function call counts.