The Observation Deck

Views on software from Bryan Cantrill's deck chair

Tuesday July 03, 2007

DTrace on the Scoble Show

For those who didn't see it, Team DTrace was on the Scoble Show. As I mention at the end of the interview, this was the day after my younger son was born (if you look closely at my right wrist, you will note that I am still wearing my hospital bracelet in the interview). You can see the cigars that I offered at the end of the interview (and they were damn fine cigars, by the way) in a photo of Team DTrace that Scoble took afterwards. After the photo, we returned to our office and smoked the cigars -- and then had an unplanned conversation with the building management about never again smoking cigars in the office. (I responded that I was done having kids, so they had nothing to worry about.)

Finally, as for DTrace on the iPhone (to which we made brief reference in the interview): it is now our understanding that alas, DTrace is not on the iPhone -- Apple has apparently not yet ported DTrace to the ARM -- but that a DTrace port "may be" in the works. So the dream is alive!

(2007-07-03 22:42:21.0/2007-07-03 22:38:56.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Comments:

Presumably dtrace on iPhone would only be of any use to Apple themeselves though, as nobody else can develop (proper) software for it...

Posted by 213.202.183.5 on July 04, 2007 at 08:27 AM PDT #

Provided one could execute it (it's unclear to me if it's even possible to hack one's way to a shell on the iPhone), DTrace would be useful to more than the developers: it would tell you what the hell your phone is doing. If your phone is doing something that you have control over (an app that you've left running that has gone haywire for example), you could take action to resolve the problem -- like, killing the app. And given that AJAX is the iPhone programming model, DTrace would be especially useful on the iPhone if Safari were to have a DTrace-enabled JavaScript interpreter -- but I think that's too much Mantasy™ even for me...

Posted by Bryan Cantrill on July 05, 2007 at 08:57 AM PDT #

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