How to find total number instructions of a program?

Question

I want to find the total number of machine instructions of an Android Application. I have explored the Debug.InstructionCount class of Android SDK, but I believe it provides info of Dalvik VM instructions (not the machine level instructions which actually executes on the processor). I need this info to estimate the time required for the execution of an Android application on a particular processor (using fixed frequency). I am aware of the fact that different type of instructions take variable cycles due to which the computational time cannot be estimated accurately, but I still want to do some experimentation. Thank you

Answer 1

My solution involves writing an instruction set simulator, running the app and counting the instructions. There are already open source avr simulators out there than you can just use/modify for this.

At the end of the day in order to do this you have to follow the instruction flow, so either you actually sim it and that automatically solves how many times the code really goes through a loop and such, or you write a disassembler (which is half of a simulator) and basically follow the code flow in execution order (actually much simpler than a full disassembler or simulator) but you have to deal with all the possible code paths and loops as you find the different paths and count the different paths. With minimal work you could come up with the shortest possible path and know the code could never be faster than that.