ANN: prof2dot, version 0.4.1

[Gregory Wright]

I am pleased to announce the release of prof2dot version 0.4.1,
a graphical profiling tool for use with GHC.

The program is a filter that takes the profiling output generated by  
running
a GHC-compiled program with the "+RTS -px -RTS" option and turns it into
a dot file.  (The "dot" format is a textual representation of a  
directed or undirected graph.)
The dot file can rendered in any format supported by Graphviz's
dot program, and the file itself can be post-processed or edited to  
adjust the
layout.

The new release fixes a number of bugs and has some significant
improvements in its internal organization over the previous 0.3.1
("Premature Optimizations 'r' Us") release.

Version 0.4.1 ("Triumph of Hope Over Experience") defaults to generating
a call graph colored by number of entries into each call center.  There
is now an option to annotate the graph edges with the triple of
(cost center entries, ticks, allocations).  Module names are also given
in each cost center.

The latest version has been tested on the profiling output of some  
moderately
large programs, e.g., the profile produced by a "darcs get" of the  
entire
ghc repository:

	$ darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc +RTS -px -RTS

There is also better error reporting of parser errors and consistency  
checking
of the internal graph data structure.  If anyone comes across a parse  
failure
or an assertion failure, please report it to the author.

The "dot" program from the graphviz tools is required to render the  
output of prof2dot.
Very large graphs, or graphs with extensive annotations, can exceed  
the capabilities of dot.

Prof2dot is available from Hackage in the "development" category.

-Greg