Saving variable sizes over loops in Julia with varinfo - julia

Question

I'm trying to see how the size of variables I'm working with increase over each iteration of a loop. I'm not sure which variables are increasing in size, so I would like to capture all of them. To do so I would like to use varinfo(), but as this outputs a Markdown table I'm not able to access it. Is there a way to either convert the Markdown table to a more useable format, or else save the size of variables in the environment in general?
Ideally, I would like as output a dataframe with as many rows or columns as the number of loops, and the size of each variable in each corresponding loop saved.

Answer 1

I really like your idea for debugging purposes :-)
This code is inspired by: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/InteractiveUtils/src/InteractiveUtils.jl
using DataFrames
function debug_list_vals(m::Module=Main)
res = DataFrame()
vs = [v for v in sort!(names(m)) if isdefined(m, v)]
for v in vs
value = getfield(m, v)
if !(value===Base || value===Main || value===Core ||
value===InteractiveUtils || value===debug_list_vals)
append!(res, DataFrame(v=v,size=Base.summarysize(value),
summary=summary(value)))
end
end
res
end
Now let's give it a spin:
julia> for i in 1:3
push!(some_array, i)
println("i=$i ::", debug_list_vals())
end
i=1 ::2×3 DataFrame
│ Row │ v │ size │ summary │
│ │ Symbol │ Int64 │ String │
├─────┼────────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ 1 │ ans │ 48 │ 1-element Array{Int64,1} │
│ 2 │ some_array │ 48 │ 1-element Array{Int64,1} │
i=2 ::2×3 DataFrame
│ Row │ v │ size │ summary │
│ │ Symbol │ Int64 │ String │
├─────┼────────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ 1 │ ans │ 56 │ 2-element Array{Int64,1} │
│ 2 │ some_array │ 56 │ 2-element Array{Int64,1} │
i=3 ::2×3 DataFrame
│ Row │ v │ size │ summary │
│ │ Symbol │ Int64 │ String │
├─────┼────────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────┤
│ 1 │ ans │ 64 │ 3-element Array{Int64,1} │
│ 2 │ some_array │ 64 │ 3-element Array{Int64,1} │