Re: [9fans] dtrace for plan 9

[dave.l@mac.com]

Having banged my head against D's rampant inconsistency and almost but
not quite total dissimilarity to awk,
I think even acid's intemperate lingo is preferable.
OTOH, the idea of chucking ANY language interpreter into a kernel
seems wrong too.

Yes, dtrace dtrace/D provide great capabilities (trust me: I
administer hairy systems and dtrace has definitely helped us),
and some of the ideas are good, but the whole thing is a mess.

Maybe I'm missing something,
but wouldn't be slightly nicer to have something like a set of dynamic
probes
which queue up blobs of data up for userland code to do the hairy
lifting on?

Also, you don't want a debugger, you want a data analyser: awk, maybe?

Dave.

On 28 Oct 2009, at 02:38, Jeff Sickel wrote:

> Yes please.  I'd hate to see the Plan 9 ideas turned into subjecting
> some unfortunate programmer(s) with having to write hundreds of
> thousands of probes instead of following the more acid based approach.
>
> dtrace has it's place.  And as you've said, eye candy wins.  But I
> still think there's a way to use acid and the linker to provide the
> kinds of hooks you want for debugging.
>
> -jas
>
> On Oct 27, 2009, at 9:23 PM, ron minnich wrote:
>
>> One other thought on this line. The dtrace tools include a kernel
>> module which understands the dtrace language. Maybe an alternative
>> plan 9 approach is a kernel driver which understands acid.
>>
>>
>>
>> ron
>
>