軟體學徒forever

 I have used BPF performance tools for about half of a year. The tools are really useful and let me investigate the whole system from a new angle. When COSCUP 2020 comes, I had no hesitate to give a talk about them. I would like to share the slides here again to promote this useful tool. Enjoy it! (ps: video is here )

I reread one of my favorite textbook, structure and interpretation of computer programs (SICP), recently. I would like to summarize some insights I got from the book to investigate some understandings with my previous experience . So the content would be some personal random notes and not for everyone. :-) Here comes some from chapter 1, Building Abstractions with Procedures. * Why using the a non-mainsteam programming language? Because Scheme has very simple syntax and flexible semantics to implement broad range of applications easily, that's so important for a computer science student to know the main ideas by constructing infrastructures so that they won't get lost among the fancy features coming up everyday. I think this is useful especially when programmers get mature. They will find out that language features are not so important. The important thing is to deeply understand the ideas behind the complex components. If we can construct toy examples, that will be huge...

First thing first, I will give this book Highly Recommended. The author is famous for his work on systems performance for long, including marvelous DTrace Toolkits, flame graph, heat map... I also follow his wonderful website for several years. When the author announced his plan to publish a book about BPF, I wait for the date coming and it really didn't let me disappointed. :-) This books contains 4 parts. The first 2 parts are the meats. Part I describes the technologies will be used in part II. It contains what is BPF, what is BCC, what is bpftrace. And the most important: what mechanisms under the hood. It's so important that people need to know enough underneath to use the high-level tools well that they would not run into the corners of the limitations of tools frequently. Although author suggests readers can skim the Chapter 2, Technology Background, I highly recommend you not to. Part II starts the real topics about this book: Performance Analysis. It starts fr...