Hot spot analysis & instruction usage by counting the instructions executed during simulation (which will match the number executed on the actual processor or unmonitored execution), the simulator can provide both a measure of relative performance between different versions of algorithm and also be used to detect "hot spots" where optimization can then be targeted by the programmer. In this role it can be considered a form of Performance analysis as it is not easy to obtain these statistics under normal execution and this is especially true for high level language programs which effectively 'disguise' the extent of machine code instructions by their nature.