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Exploring Leopard with DTrace

MacTech has an excellent article on using d-trace: the newly included debugging tool included with Mac OS X 10.5.

Go ahead and check it out.  You’ll be smarter when you’re done.

Software is abstract and non-tactile by its very nature. It can be difficult to see what it is doing and why it may be misbehaving. To get a better view of software, we often use tools like gdb, leaks, lsof, and sc_usage, just to name a few. We even still use “caveman debugging” techniques like recompiling the code with additional print statements.

A few years back, Sun Microsystems developed DTrace: a new and innovative way to trace running software on live systems. DTrace enables developers and administrators to “see” what their code, and others’ code, is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. With the release of Leopard, Apple has brought DTrace to Mac OS X.