CppCon 2019

Have you ever wondered how profilers work? Did you ever run into a situation where you wanted to write your own custom profiler, but didn't know how to go about it? Then this talk is for you.

We will build a proof-of-concept heap profiler on Linux that implements the most important aspects of a custom tracing profiler: Intercepting function calls, runtime injection, call stack unwinding and debug symbol resolution. All of these concepts are generic and don't only apply to a heap profiler, we will just use that as a motivating example.

The talk will also touch on some of the lessons learned creating a productionized heap profiler called heaptrack: What data format should you use? How can you compress the data? What needs to be taken into account to support profiling on embedded platforms?

Combined, this talk will teach you about some of the layers behind the scenes of a standardized C++ application. Sadly, these layers tend to be platform dependent. For that reason, this talk concentrates on Linux, but the core principles apply to other platforms too.