Install "perf" on Mac
Instruments app
On macOS you can use the Instruments application to profile your code.
I like to use the "Time Profiler" which will show you how much time your application is its various parts during execution. I haven't used perf myself, but from talks/videos that I've seen this seems to be the most common use.
To use the "Time Profiler":
- Run Instruments, select Time Profiler
- At the top left, select your target (executable).
- Hit the Record button on the top left and let it run for a little while.
- Pause or Stop the execution and drill down on your calls in the main window.
Hope this helps.
Check out Google Perf Tool
If you dont have brew installed:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" < /dev/null 2> /dev/null
If you have brew installed:
brew install google-perftools
Reference: https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools
On OSX you can use sample together with filtercalltree.
Both have useful help text if you run them without commands, but an example invocation to sample process id 1234 for the default 10 seconds at 1ms resolution would be something like:
sample 1234 -f output.prof
filtercalltree output.prof
Once you've generated your call graph, FlameGraph is another great tool for visualizing it, and it supports sample call graphs via the stackcollpase-sample.awk script.
As @Sami Laine said in his comment, the Linux perf tool is dependent on Linux specific code. It relies on the perf_event_open system call which is not standardized.
Note: Maybe you could search how MacOSX users are using recent hardware performance counters.