Fixes and improvements to the WMC tool

[malenov]

Dear all,

during the development of the 3GPP IVAS codec a couple of issues and potential improvements were identified in the wmc_tool, for example:

• NaN printed in the complexity printout for a non-instrumented function
• update of memory consumption counters could be called from the function update_wmops()
• suboptimal code updating the worst-case intra-frame and inter-frame heap memory consumption
• detailed per-frame and per-block memory consumption exported to a .csv file
• incorrect calculation of the worst-case heap size for memory blocks allocated and de-allocated multiple times in a single frame

Exporting the detailed per-frame and per-block memory consumption to an external file allows for running external statistical analysis tools such as Python pandas.

I will provide an update of the wmc_tool addressing all the above issues.

[ludomal]

Thank you, @malenov, for presenting the current issues with wmc_tool. We are looking forward to your contribution. The next ITU-T SG12 meeting will be around April next year; this gives us some time to prepare for the next revision of the STL.

[malenov]

So far all known problems and issues were fixed. Here's an excerpt of the changelog:

• fixed a problem where NaN was printed for a non-instrumented function having zero complexity
• dynamic allocation and re-allocation of all internal buffers tracking both heap and stack call trees; with this fix there is no hard limitation for the total number of functions supported in the whole project and no limitation to the stack depth
• introduction of a new -f FRAME_PER_SECONDS command-line option allowing the user to choose the number of frames per second (default is still 50.0)
• fixed a problem when push_wmops() was called twice when WMOPS_DETAILS was activated
• the WMC tool will raise an error message if #define WMC_TOOL_SKIP is not paired with #undef WMC_TOOL_SKIP

The following new features (functionality) were added:

• export information about all dynamical allocations/de-allocations occuring during the runtime of the codec to a .csv file
• example Python script mem_analysis.py for graphical analysis and profiling of dynamic memory alloations based on the generated .csv file
• counting complexity and PROM size of BASOP operations and BASOP functions within floating-point source code

The new version of the WMC tool is v1.5

[malenov]

@ludomal, shall I create a changelog.txt file with the description of the above modifications or describe them in the README.MD file?

[malenov]

I've just created the file HISTORY.md containing the history of modifications to the WMC tool.