KProfile lets you efficiently create, store, view and compare profiling results made with a simple Dsl. This helps to understand the performance changes caused by different changes to the code.

For creating profiling results for a method you have to simply define an object which inherits from ProfilingSuite.

object Initial: Tag("Initial")

object PrimeTestProfiling: ProfilingSuite("prime test", Initial {
    val x = 23090909
    profile("testing primality of a very big integer") {
        primeTest(x)
    }
})

Now you can call the run method of ProfilingSuite to store the results in a file in the AppData directory.

You don't have to do anything except calling the run method and KProfile stores all the information for you.

But what about the parameters of the constructor for ProfilingSuite?

The first parameter which we have passes "prime test" to is the topic.

It should describe what you profile in this suite.

We will hear more about the topic in the section Viewing Profiling results.

The second parameter is a tag. It defines which version of the program is profiled. Tags will become essential when comparing many versions of a program.

For now we simply pass Initial because we are profiling the first version of out program. When we apply changes we create new tags and pass them to the ProfilingSuite.

Now if KProfile would just store the profiling results in some unreadable format in some unknown file with a crazy name it would be pretty useless.

KProfile provides a Kotlin-API to view and compare profiling results using plain text or converting the results to markdown.

This API works best with the Kotlin-REPL by Jetbrains.

You can view results with the view function of the interface ResultFormat.

There are two implementations of that interface.

• plaintext
• markdown

The latter is a function and takes a markdown theme or applies the default theme.