How should I profile visual c++ express?

Question

I've read a lot of the posts here giving profiling advice but I need to ask this.

From what I can tell, Visual C++ Express doesn't generate a debugging file that is used by profiler programs. I tried AMD Codeanalyst and it seemed to work fine except none of the routines in my program were identified -- just a lot of "unidentified modules".

I'm new to C++. I'm used to the simple profiler used by Python. Simple, I assume, because the language is interpreted.

I appreciate any insights.

P.S.: Is the rotation of the steering wheel the derivative of the rotation of the car?

Solution

First, the polar angular velocity of the car should be proportional to the speed of the car and to the angular position of the steering wheel (to a first approximation).

Second, there's hardly a professor or blogger or book author who will tell you this, but if you want to see what the code is doing and optimize it, the hands-down simplest way is this.

Added: Programmers have a strong tendency to assume that any automated profiling tool will do a better job than the manual technique, but that depends on the details of exactly what they do. Most of them implement what's popular rather than what is most effective. The result is some performance problems being missed, putting a cap on the speedup you can get. Here is a list of common misconceptions that result in failing to find performance problems.

Some profilers do get it nearly right, including RotateRight/Zoom and LTProf.