Google Is Working On An Efficiency Sanitizer To Improve Performance Problems

Derek Bruening of Google has announced the company's interest in creating an "Efficiency Sanitizer" for LLVM/Clang for analyzing targeted performance problems.

Worked on Google and other compoanies have been Address Sanitizer, Memory Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, Leak Sanitizer, Data Flow Sanitizer, and other sanitizers found in LLVM/Clang some of which have also been ported to GCC. These sanitizers have been incredibly helpful for developers in catching various problems within program code-bases, including many security issues. The latest focus being pursued by Google's compiler engineers is on an Efficiency Sanitizer.

The short explanation by Derek Bruening about "ESAN" is "We plan to build a suite of compiler-based dynamic instrumentation tools for analyzing targeted performance problems. These tools will all live under a new 'EfficiencySanitizer' (or 'esan') sanitizer umbrella, as they will share significant portions of their implementations."

There's still code to be written, but it's good to see greater focus now on systematically catching efficiency/performance problems within code-bases. You can learn more about the Efficiency Sanitizer proposal via this LLVM mailing list message.