Tracy Profiler Integration

[Daandelange]

Opening a new issue for the Tracy integration, continuing the off-topic discussion from #22 .

So the idea is to integrate Tracy to facilitate debugging, with a focus on :

• Data flow and order-of execution (plotting values, monitor execution times, mutex locks, etc,) frame by frame.
• Memory usage (allocations, memory map, garbage collector, etc.)
• GPU profiling on Linux + Windows.

Here's a screenshot from the 0.7.2 manual showing platform-specific features :

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• 0. Define where and how how to integrate it.
  I think it's important to keep Tracy as an optional build config : not everybody will need it, and as is seems to need recent system software to be able to inspect. What about a 3rd build option : Debug, DebugTracy, Release ?
  Later on, (special) release builds could also include it with a menu option to enable it, allowing remote debugging.

• 1. Integrate the Tracy client into Mosaic/ofxVP. Easy : add submodule, include 1 file and set compile flag to enable.
  I have tested this with the Mosaic-Engine-Tester on a local branch. There seem to be some compile flags to set for better results (name stripping...). Also, they recommend not to run a client with a "debug config" regarding the associated compilation optimization flags.
  This makes Tracy send real-time Mosaic debug info over a network socket. (local by default)

• 2. Compile the Tracy Profiler which allows to view & inspect the data.
  This seems as the easiest way to get started, there are more possibilities such as recording data for non-real-time debugging, and on-demand remote debugging.
  To build, you need to have a recent C++17 compiler. OSX 10.12.6 seems not possible. Maybe 10.13 with a more recent toolchain. I tried on a relatively old Linux Mint 16, with GCC 6.1, which should support C++17 but not with the needed extra features that Tracy uses. (Didn't try available workarounds yet.) So it looks like the Profiler needs a recent OS to be plug-and-play, compared to general OF/Mosaic capable setups.

• 3. Fine-tune Tracy to our specific needs. Playing around with it will tell us. Probably some macros to add to get the best results, plus the optional-recommended macros to implement.

• 4. Document usage.

[Daandelange]

I got some time for this, it's quite easy to integrate but everything you collect is manual.
I'll definitely implement Tracy to facilitate #22. It will help optimize code, detect order-of-execution glitches, locks/mutexes that slow down threads, spot useless memory allocations, etc. And it might give an interactive insight of the inner mechanics of Mosaic for newcomers.

Here's 2 first screenshots to give an insight of what to expect.
Here, MosaicEngineTester ran on osx while the Tracy Profiler ran on Linux.


I'll add some details soon.

[d3cod3]

Great to hear it's working! Can't wait to have it running with Mosaic

[Daandelange]

Side note: Tracy 0.8 brings a lot of multithreading-related updates, looks promising.

Edit: Current state:
Basic Tracy support has been added in c72c920 and 7de0753 . If I'm correct, all steps above still need to be checked, and some more Tracy features could be enabled.
There's also a Tracy Profiler Wiki with some initial instructions.