Comments on: Objective-C: Printing Class Name from Dtrace

By: Nicolas Seriot

Nicolas Seriot — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:23:07 +0000

A coworker and I found what seems to be an undocumented behaviour of the -F option. Consider this minimal DTrace script:

pid$target::*NSDate*:entry {}
pid$target::*NSDate*:return {}

With -F, DTrace pretty prints the Objective-C messages, including the class/instance method sign.

$ sudo dtrace -s objc_calls.d -F -c /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
CPU FUNCTION                                 
  1  -> +[NSDatePicker initialize]            
  1    -> +[NSDatePickerCell initialize]      
  1    <- +[NSDatePickerCell initialize]      
  1   +[NSDate distantFuture]               
  0  <- +[NSDate distantFuture]               
...

By the way, TextEdit initializing NSDatePicker on startup seems kind of weird.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:45:48 +0000

Does the same principle apply to Java?

By: Plastkort

Plastkort — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:32:14 +0000

Interesting information. Does the same principle apply to Java?

By: David Mandelin’s blog » Blog Archive » DTrace C++ Mysteries Solved

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:58:01 +0000

[...] have been added as part of Objective C support, Googled “dtrace objective c”, found a blog post, followed a link from there to the Apple dtrace man page, saw the “-xmangled” option, [...]

By: The Omni Mouth » More objc method tracing

The Omni Mouth » More objc method tracing — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:44:36 +0000

[...] Objective-C: Printing Class Name from Dtrace [...]