Article on Sun's DTrace

[Daniel Ellard]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, David Schultz wrote:

> The page referenced earlier in this thread pointed out that 6
> staff-years went into DTrace.  That's accurate, and we're not
> talking about part-time employees or people who don't know what
> they're doing.  The D compiler aside, this is not a small matter
> of programming that can just be ported to a new OS or machine
> architecture in a few months.

I don't doubt that DTrace took a long time to do.  However, in most
projects the design phase consumes a lot of time, and it is often the
case that unforeseen problems or changes in the feature set cost the
developers a lot of time.  So while it might have taken six years to
write DTrace the first time, I suspect it would take a fraction of
that time to re-implement.  (It certainly might be longer than "a few
months" and I'm not going to quibble.  We won't know the precise
number until someone does the port.)

-Dan