# Development Guidelines

This section outlines information useful for developers interested in contributing to Ddisasm.

## Souffle interpreter

For accelerated development of datalog logic, ddisasm can also execute the
Souffle interpreter. To invoke the interpreter, specify a `--debug-dir`
directory path and the `--interpreter` parameter, optionally with the path to
ddisasm's source directory.

For example:
```
$ cd ddisasm/examples/ex1
$ make
$ mkdir dbg
$ ddisasm --debug-dir dbg --interpreter ../../ --asm ex.s ex
```

## Profiling

Maintaining ddisasm's high performance for disassembling binaries, both large
and small, is an important goal of the project. Profiling new contributions is
a necessary step to ensure they do not introduce performance regressions.

To assist with this, ddisasm can execute
[Souffle's profiler](https://souffle-lang.github.io/profiler) by passing
`--profile` argument, specifing a directory path where profiles of each pass
should be generated.

For the default configuration of ddisasm, `--profile` can only be used
along with `--interpreter`. For example:

```
$ ddisasm --debug-dir dbg --interpreter --profile profiles --asm ex.s examples/ex1/ex
```

Profiling with the interpreter is relatively slow, however. As an
alternative, ddisasm can be compiled with profiling support by passing
`-DDDISASM_SOUFFLE_PROFILING=ON` to cmake. In this case, the
`--interpreter` argument should be omitted.

This generates a profile for each pass, e.g.: `profiles/disassembly.prof` and
`profiles/no-return-analysis.prof`. These can be used with `souffleprof` to
generate a HTML report:

```
$ souffleprof -j profiles/disassembly.prof
SouffleProf
Generating HTML files...
file output to: profiler_html/1.html
```