On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Adrian Lienhard <adi@netstyle.ch> wrote:

Has anybody considered adding a DTrace user space provider to the VM?

This could be very helpful for debugging and profiling (at least on Mac; I don't know about DTrace for Linux).

My man pages on OS X describe the same approach for adding probes to a C program as in http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/user_land_tracing_gets_better

Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP and others have such high-level providers.

Yes, but things like MethodWrappers can provide excellent visibility and the VM already has lots of introspective support for memory usage, garbage colleciton timings, context switch counts, etc. I don't see DTrace as that compelling. What do you see as the costs and benefits?

Cheers,
Adrian
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