1.3.0 Release Next Week

[Todd C. Olson]

On Thursday 11 June 2009 19:17:00 UTC chromatic wrote:

> I'm not sure how it would record and report PIR control flow, but DTrace
> annotations would be useful.

Unfortunately at the moment my knowledge of the parrot code base is
essentially zero.
I'm currently floundering about trying to locate the code where parrot
recognizes a sub has been defined via PIR and then when the that sub is
executed.

On the other hand, having parrot instrumented with DTrace USDT
would be fantastic because then I could write DTrace scripts to correlate
parrot higher level activities with operating system level activities it
triggers.

So instead, here is what I've found about adding DTrace USDT.

The basics of adding USDT to code is described at
    http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics_USDT
with useful links at the bottom of that page.
Further, write up of expanding the Javascript project to instrument all of
Mozilla
    http://opensolaris.org/os/project/mozilla-dtrace/
with implementation decisions
    https://bug370906.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=257958
seems to described how they solve the problem of having the code compile
on even if the platform does not support DTrace.

The same technique seems to have been used to at USDTs to Tcl
    http://wiki.tcl.tk/19923
with great examples of use toward the bottom

There even seems to have been some work towards USDTs for Perl 5.8.8
    http://wikis.sun.com/display/DTrace/perl+Provider
    http://mirrorshades.org/overflow/2007/10/perl_and_dtrace.shtml
    http://blogs.sun.com/alanbur/entry/dtrace_and_perl
    http://fosiki.com/blog/2007/12/14/dtrace-perl-and-twiki-on-solaris/

Regards,
Todd Olson