OpenSolaris adds more developer goodies

The new version of OpenSolaris has quite a few new features, and some of them look interesting for the developer. While Crossbow will help during testing — having your entire application infrastructure replicated on your desktop is always useful — it's infrastructure rather than a productivity tool.

Some of the developer additions could be considered playing catch-up: Git and JavaFX have been available on other operating systems for some time. You could also argue that including compatibility with other OSs' APIs is just copying what others have done -- and Sun has only added two calls to OpenSolaris from Linux and BSD.

However, what's also been added are more traces for DTrace, OpenSolaris's not-that-secret weapon. If you're not familiar with DTrace, it's a debugging and optimisation tool that tells you exactly what your application does. That's not "what it's meant to do", but how it interacts with other code, including the operating system. Use it in the right way, and it's almost like having a Matrix-esque view of what's happening inside your system. It's available in Solaris, OpenSolaris, BSD and by extension Mac OS X. The Linux port is still in development.

Being able to increase your application's performance, or find out why you're thrashing the disk can save you hours of poring over code guessing at the answer. Like any good tool it takes time to learn how to use it properly, but once you have it's fantastic.

DTrace was one of the first components of Solaris to be released as open source by Sun. While this was under a licence incompatible with the GPL, but the porting effort has been able to compile DTrace on Linux with no kernel source changes, hence no licensing conflict. It will be interesting to see how using DTrace on Linux compares with other platforms, but until that time if you need to squeeze the most out of your application and the hardware it runs on, you could do worse than try compiling it on OpenSolaris and checking it out.