LWN: Comments on "Some advanced BCC topics"

Some advanced BCC topics

mathstuf — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 15:24:50 +0000

> without having changed a bit

I see Debian Jessie in the list there, so it's not completely unchanged. ;)

Some advanced BCC topics

nix — Sat, 03 Mar 2018 18:51:53 +0000

If you want a blast from the past, http://tvision.sf.net/ might be worth a look, or would be if *.sf.net wasn't down at the moment. (It's amazing how archaic it seems now, without having changed a bit.)

Some advanced BCC topics

mathstuf — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 17:39:03 +0000

I think it was my first C++ compiler[1] (the Dev-C++ IDE), though mostly due to it being free and me being just a grade school student. I don't remember having bad experiences with it specifically, but it has not kept up with the times…

[1]TI-GCC was probably my first C compiler.

Some advanced BCC topics

ianmcc — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:26:30 +0000

A good compiler in its day though. Borland C++ was astounding, compared with the Microsoft C++ at the time - it was a decade or so (and a change of head of their C++ group) before Microsoft decided that any kind of standards compliance was worth aiming for.

Some advanced BCC topics

mathstuf — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 21:34:12 +0000

The "bcc" tool could also have been the Borland compiler (historically). Woe to those still using it.

Some advanced BCC topics

ncultra — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 15:11:19 +0000

Timely and relevant article, thank you, love to see more. The previous article helped me the same day it was published with a kernel performance evaluation I was doing. I ended up running more than 6k KVM guests on a huge machine and got scheduling latency data using BCC. I spent most of my work time building LLVM for the linux distro I had to use, which is a variant of fedora. Once that task was finished, the hardest thing I had to do was to decide which particular tool of many was best to use. If anyone is on the fence because of the LLVM requirement, I would say go ahead, its worth it.

Some advanced BCC topics

justincormack — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 20:04:52 +0000

There is a LuaJIT backend see https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/0c8c179fc1283600887ef...

Some advanced BCC topics

xtifr — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 01:07:31 +0000

Not to mention the specialized 8086 C compiler you'll get if you type "apt-get install bcc" on most Debian based systems. Which claims to be important for "the development of boot loaders or BIOS-related 8086 code".

A mildly unfortunate overloading of TLAs at best.

Some advanced BCC topics

Cyberax — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 22:18:39 +0000

bpfd is a horrible hack.

It just seems a waste to require the full LLVM machinery when the target is so simple and most scripts are trivial. A good old one-pass translator will probably be more than sufficient for most of users.

Some advanced BCC topics

Cyberax — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 22:17:04 +0000

Yes, something like this. Would be nice to have it in Python completely to avoid having to compile it on Android.

Some advanced BCC topics

blubber — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 22:12:43 +0000

In terms of language (although that's probably not your question), there's bpftrace which is dtrace style syntax, but it also uses LLVM in the background though
(https://github.com/ajor/bpftrace).

Another project that allows for making it easier to run bcc on remote systems is bpfd which seems to be used by Android folks. It allows to run bcc on a remotely connected system without the need to have the entire LLVM infrastructure there. The announcement of the project was here https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/137 (https://github.com/joelagnel/bpfd). Perhaps this might rather be what you could be looking for wrt remote system.

Some advanced BCC topics

danielthompson — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:57:10 +0000

There's ply: https://github.com/iovisor/ply . Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?

Some advanced BCC topics

akkornel — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 04:20:48 +0000

Completely off-topic:

A good April 1st thing would be to post a follow-up, "Some more advanced BCC topics", and have the article be entirely about email.

Some advanced BCC topics

unixbhaskar — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 02:48:55 +0000

Nice write-up Matt! thanks a bunch...learned a lot.

Some advanced BCC topics

unixbhaskar — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 02:47:55 +0000

Yup, that's a good point.

Some advanced BCC topics

Cyberax — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 22:35:37 +0000

Are there any smaller (and more feature-limited) BPS languages that don't require full LLVM+Clang to compile?