User:Garamond Lethe/Testbed/Pin Exegesis/About

About
Hi, I'm Garamond. I've been using Pin for a couple of years now. There's a common complaint on the Pinheads mailing list that Pin is difficult to learn how to use. There is a good reason for this difficulty: Pin gives the tool user an amazing amount of flexibility and power; and with that comes an API that is unusually complete and complex. The documentation and example code together with a few questions to the mailing list will be enough to get sophisticated users started: in my case, I had taken several graduate Computer Architecture classes, taught undergraduate Assembly Language, spent six months working with an early version of Dyninst on the Blue Gene/L architecture and another three months studying the internals of Valgrind.

These are my notes to myself. To the extent that you're me, you may find them useful.