Monitoring Machine Performance

Simulation is useful not only for verifying the correctness of a proposed machine design but also for measuring the machine's performance. For example, we can install in our simulation program a "meter" that measures the number of stack operations used in a computation. To do this, we modify our simulated stack to keep track of the number of times registers are saved on the stack and the maximum depth reached by the stack, and add a message to the stack's interface that prints the statistics, as shown below. We also add an operation to the basic machine model to print the stack statistics, by initializing the-ops in make-new-machine to

(list (list 'initialize-stack
            (lambda () (stack 'initialize)))
      (list 'print-stack-statistics
            (lambda () (stack 'print-statistics))))

Here is the new version of make-stack:

(define (make-stack)
  (let ((s '())
        (number-pushes 0)
        (max-depth 0)
        (current-depth 0))
    (define (push x)
      (set! s (cons x s))
      (set! number-pushes (+ 1 number-pushes))
      (set! current-depth (+ 1 current-depth))
      (set! max-depth (max current-depth max-depth)))
    (define (pop)
      (if (null? s)
          (error "Empty stack -- POP")
          (let ((top (car s)))
            (set! s (cdr s))
            (set! current-depth (- current-depth 1))
            top)))    
    (define (initialize)
      (set! s '())
      (set! number-pushes 0)
      (set! max-depth 0)
      (set! current-depth 0)
      'done)
    (define (print-statistics)
      (newline)
      (display (list 'total-pushes  '= number-pushes
                     'maximum-depth '= max-depth)))
    (define (dispatch message)
      (cond ((eq? message 'push) push)
            ((eq? message 'pop) (pop))
            ((eq? message 'initialize) (initialize))
            ((eq? message 'print-statistics)
             (print-statistics))
            (else
             (error "Unknown request -- STACK" message))))
    dispatch))

Exercises 5.15 through 5.19 describe other useful monitoring and debugging features that can be added to the register-machine simulator.