> Evaluate "majority" this way: For every/any random binary in a distro, out of all the currently running instances of that binary in the world at any given moment, how many of those need to be profiled?
> There is no way the answer is "most of them".
This is an absurd way to evaluate it. All it takes is one savvy user to report a performance problem that developers are able to root-cause using stack traces from the user's system. Suppose they're able to make a 5% performance improvement to the program. Now all user's programs are 5% faster because of the frame pointers on this one user's system.
At this point people usually ask: but couldn't developers have done that on their own systems with debug code? But the performance of debug code is not the same as the performance of shipping code. And not all problems manifest the same on all systems. This is why you need shipping code to be debuggable (or instrumentable or profileable or whatever you want to call it).
This is an absurd way to evaluate it. All it takes is one savvy user to report a performance problem that developers are able to root-cause using stack traces from the user's system. Suppose they're able to make a 5% performance improvement to the program. Now all user's programs are 5% faster because of the frame pointers on this one user's system.
At this point people usually ask: but couldn't developers have done that on their own systems with debug code? But the performance of debug code is not the same as the performance of shipping code. And not all problems manifest the same on all systems. This is why you need shipping code to be debuggable (or instrumentable or profileable or whatever you want to call it).