[Python-Dev] DTRACE support (original) (raw)

Charles-François Natali cf.natali at gmail.com
Fri Sep 6 19:12:46 CEST 2013

The main value of DTrace is systemwide observability. You can see something "strange" at kernel level and trace it to a particular line of code in a random Python script. There is no other tool that can do that. You have complete transversal observability of ALL the code running in your computer, kernel or usermode, clean reports with threads, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying DTrace is useless. I'm just saying that, as far as I'm concerned, I've never had any trouble debugging/tunning a Python script with non-intrusive tools (strace, gdb, valgrind, and oprofile for profiling). Of course, this includes analysing bug reports.

Maybe the biggest objection would be that most python-devs are running Linux, and you don't have dtrace support on linux unless you are running Oracle distribution. But world is larger than linux, and there are some efforts to port DTrace to Linux itself. DTrace is available on Solaris and derivatives, MacOS X and FreeBSD.

That's true, I might have a different opinion if I used Solaris. But that's not the case, so te me, the cognitive overhead incurred by this large patch isn't worth it.

So I'm -1, but that's a personal opinion :-)

cf

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