Apple Xray

["Mariot Chauvin" <mariot chauvin gmail com>]

Hi all,

I don't know if you hear about Apple Xray, the new performance visualization tool that would be included in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
The following link give an interesting presentation with a screenshot : 
http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/index.html
The tool builds on top of DTrace utility, the framework created by Sun. The work is in progress to port it to FreeBSD.

I know there are very useful tools to profile and measuring performance on linux like strace, gprof, sysprof, valgrind.
People are writing great scripts to display charts ( like the federico plot-timeline python script)
However there is still often the need to write application own measurement and application own test framework (some application examples can be gtk+ themes or cairo). 

I like the approach of Xray, and I think we need a global performance application which builds on a framework. The global application would be enough extensible, to add a measurement test for a specific software, to obtain a graphical view of the result.
The GtkWidgetProfiler could for example connect to the framework to provide gui performance informations.

What's your opinions and comments about this and Xray ?

Regards,

Mariot