Another time, it shows that it's really nice to go to the Perl conferences, just for the stuff you pick up in passing

I think I spent some time with Nicholas Clark and ?nobull? Alan Burlison who implemented the Solaris/Dtrace connection with Perl. It's still in early beta and has a quite severe runtime hit; I think I remember a slowdown of 5% just for linking the Dtrace stuff in, without any instrumentation.

But I expect this thing to really move forward, even if it's only for Solaris.

I'm not too familiar with Dtrace myself, but what I gleaned from the idea/concept of Dtrace, it seems quite like the Win32 debugger API (at least for NT and upwards), where an external process can attach to and detach from a running application and instrument it. The effect of this is, that you get a full trace from the Perl level down to the (Solaris) kernel level of all functions called. Which is quite cool, as you can attach it to any running Perl process.

Update: Alan Burlison talks about DTrace and Perl in his blog.