Runtime code instrumentation

I regularly follow the MathWorks Pick-of-the-Week (POTW) blog. In a recent post, Jiro Doke highlighted Per Isakson’s tracer4m utility. Per is an accomplished Matlab programmer, who has a solid reputation in the Matlab user community for many years. His utility uses temporary conditional breakpoints to enable users to trace calls to their Matlab functions and class methods. This uses a little-known trick that I wish to highlight in this post.

dbstop('in', filename, 'at', location, 'if', 'tracer()');

We can use this same technique for other purposes. For example, if we want to do some action (not necessarily log – perhaps do something else) when a certain code point is reached. The benefit here is that we don’t need to modify the code at all – we’re adding ad-hoc code pieces using the conditional breakpoint mechanism without affecting the source code. This is particularly useful when we do not have access to the source code (such as when it’s compiled or write-protected). All you need to do is to ensure that the instrumentation function always returns false so that the breakpoint does not become live and for code execution to continue normally.
The tracer4m utility is quite sophisticated in the sense that it uses mlint and smart regexp to parse the code and know which functions/methods occur on which line numbers and have which type (more details). In this sense, Per used undocumented functionality. I’m certain that Jiro was not aware of the dependency on undocumented features when he posted about the utility, so please don’t take this to mean that Jiro or MathWorks officially support this or any other undocumented functionality. Undocumented aspects are often needed to achieve top functionality, and I’m happy that the POTW blog highlights utilities based on their importance and merit, even if they do happen to use some undocumented aspect.
tracer4m‘s code also contains references to the undocumented profiler option -history, but this is not in fact used by the code itself, only in comments. I use this feature in my profile_history utility, which displays the function call/timing history in an interactive GUI window. This utility complements tracer4m by providing a lot more information, but this can result in a huge amount of information for large and/or long-running programs. In addition, tracer4m has the benefit of only logging those functions/methods that the user finds useful, rather than all the function call, which enables easier debugging when the relevant code area is known. In short, I wish I had known about tracer4m when I created profile_history. Now that I know about it, maybe I’ll incorporate some of its ideas into profile_history in order to make it more useful. Perhaps another moral of this is that we should actively monitor the POTW blog, because true gems are quite often highlighted there.

Function call timeline profiling