This is a dangerous slide in that it is somewhat subjective. Please ingest with a grain of salt.

DTrace

This is the reference standard of lightweight dynamic tracing environments. It was the first to the game, it has the longest history, the most support, and is the most powerful of the three.

ProbeVue

The presentation is about ProbeVue so I will skip the details and say that there is a significant effort from Austin to develop ProbeVue. Changes to the environment are seen on virtually every TL.Ê

SystemTap

I am not entirely familiar with SystemTap but I have been watching from a distance for some time.

SystemTap is the Linux (GNU*) variant. GNU is mentioned not simply out of respect to RMS, but more of an acknowledgement of licensing incompatibilities between the Sun open license on D and that of the GNU license of Linux.

The most interesting things of note on SystemTap is the metamorphic and full feature design. I see the design effects of multiple development groups pulling in different directions as well as the kitchen sink approach to features. Neither of these is meant as a compliment. The varied focus in the design means additional complexity. The full language approach means that SystemTap is capable of infinite loops (that are now modules in your kernel).

Both D and Vue seem to have a well focused / mature design that SystemTap lacks.

Others

HP is touting Ktrace and Caliper as equivalents. (Ktrace is an AIX trace ÒequivalentÓ and Caliper is a profiler.) While they are powerful tools, they are not lightweight dynamic trace tools. Furthermore (by HPs own documentation ktrace is not recommended in production environments nor can it be used in Integrity VMs.)

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Also note: Because of the nature of the probes, dynamic tracing scripts are typically NOT portable across different versions of Unix (ie: Solaris to OS-X). There will be subtle variations in the system calls that will cause a script to fail on a different Unix. There is no method to move across language environments (ie: D to Vue). Although knowledge of one language translates well into the other.