Unsolicited reviews

This page contains a collection of unsolicited reviews we've received about magic-trace:

"Magic-trace is one of the simplest command-line debugging tools I have ever used."

• Francis Ricci, Jane Street

"Magic-trace is not just for performance. The tool gives insight directly into what happens in your program, when, and why. Consider using it for all your introspective goals!"

• Andrew Hunter, Jane Street

"I use perf a ton, and I think that both perf and magic-trace give perspectives that the other doesn't. The benefit I got from magic-trace was entirely based on the fact that it works in slices at any zoom level, so I was able to see all the function calls that a 70ns function was performing, which was invisible in perf."

• Doug Patti, Jane Street

"The key advantages of magic-trace seem to be (a) it's really easy to use, and (b) because the data is a complete-if-short trace, it's really easy to interpret. I should say: magic-trace has some downsides. There are some bugs, both in our code, and in some revisions of Intel's hardware, that make it not always work reliably. And it can only be used on Intel chips (so, no AMD boxes for now, and no ARM boxes should we ever decide to care about them), and you need a physical machine, rather than a VM, to run it on. But still, all in, a very effective tool."

• Yaron Minsky, Jane Street