Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Microsoft brings its DTrace debugger to Windows

news
Mar 12, 20191 min

Users can filter on conditions or errors, write code to look at lock patterns, and detect deadlocks

red bugs
Credit: Bernard Dupont

Microsoft has released the first Windows version of DTrace, its Linux debugging tool, for 64-bit Windows 10 beta builds. Microsoft has its own ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) tool, but said ETW is static and does not allow for programmatically inserting trace points at runtime. 

DTrace on Windows is in the OpenDTrace project on GitHub. OpenDTrace began in 2016 as an effort to produce a portable implementation of DTrace for multiple operating systems. During the next few months, Microsoft plans to work with the OpenDTrace community to merge changes.

DTrace serves as a dynamic tracing framework for administrators or developers to get a real-time view into a system either in kernel or user mode. It has a C-style language for dynamically inserting trace points. Users can filter on conditions or errors, write code to look at lock patterns, and detect deadlocks.

You can download DTrace on Windows from GitHub. To run DTrace on Windows, developers need Windows 10 beta (Insider) build 18342 or higher.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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