Pin is a dynamic binary instrumentation framework for the IA-32 and x86-64 instruction-set architectures that enables the creation of dynamic program analysis tools. Some tools built with Pin are Intel® VTune™ Profiler, Intel® Advisor and Intel® Software Development Emulator (Intel® SDE). The tools created using Pin, called Pintools, can be used to perform program analysis on user space applications on Linux® and Microsoft Windows. As a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, instrumentation is performed at run time on the compiled binary files. Thus, it requires no recompiling of source code and can support instrumenting programs that dynamically generate code.

Pin provides a rich API that abstracts away the underlying instruction-set idiosyncrasies and allows context information such as register contents to be passed to the injected code as parameters. Pin automatically saves and restores the registers that are overwritten by the injected code, so the application continues to work. Limited access to symbol and debug information is available as well.

Pin is supported for Linux and Windows Platforms. On Windows, LLVM with clang-cl toolset is supported. For Linux GCC based toolset is supported. Please refer to README.md for information regarding supported versions. Detailed adoption instructions, as well as good practices, are provided in the user manual.

Pin is provided and supported by Intel, free of charge for any type of use, under the terms of the Intel Simplified Software License (ISSL). All source code contained in the Pin kit, including scripts, sample code and headers, is governed by the MIT license.