When programming in haskell we have the interpreter option :set +s. It prints some information about the code you ran. When on ghci, prints the time spent on running the code and the number of bytes used. when on hugs, prints the number of reductions made by the interpreter and the number of bytes used. How can I do the same thing in C ? I know how to print the time spent running my c code and how to print the number of clocks spent by the processor to run it. But what about the number of bytes and reductions ? I want to know a good way to compare two differents codes that do the same thing and compare which is the most efficient for me. Thanks.
If you want to compare performance, just compare time and used memory. Allow both programs exploit the same number of processor cores, write equivalent programs in both language and run benchmarks. If you are using a Unix, time(1) is your friend.
Everything else is not relevant to performance. If a program performed 10x more functions calls than another one, but ran in half of the time, it is still the one having the better performance.
The benchmark game web site compares different language using time/space criteria. You may wish to follow the same spirit.
For more careful profiling of portions of the programs, rather than the whole program, you can either use a profiler (in C) or turn on the profiling options (in GHC Haskell). Criterion is also a popular Haskell library to benchmark Haskell programs. Profiling is typically useful to spot the "hot points" in the code: long-running loops, frequently called functions, etc. This is useful because it allows the programmer to know where optimization is needed. For instance, if a function cumulatively runs for 0.05s, obtaining a 10x speed increase on that is far less useful than a 5% optimization on a function cumulatively running for 20 minutes (0.045s vs 60s gain).