Analysing software

There are times that a program fails for some unknown reason or does not perform well, and you want to find out why without having to rewrite your code and add a plethora of debugging statements. So, this section will talk about strace(1) and dtrace(1) , which allow you to see what is going on behind the scenes when you execute a program on a Unix machine. Although both tools can work with the go run command, you will get less unrelated output if you first create an executable file using go build and use this file. This mainly occurs because go run makes temporary files before actually running your Go code, and you want to debug the actual program, not the compiler used to build the program.

Remember that although dtrace(1) is more powerful than strace(1) and has its own programming language, strace(1) is more versatile for watching the system calls a program makes.