Tracing objC messages

[Lucas Schnorr]

Hi,

I have been working with trace visualization for a while, and I always wanted
to trace objective-c applications (and especially gnustep-based apps)
to have a space-time view of what is going on during execution. By trace,
in this case, I mean a set of timestamped events that register the messages
sent to the objects (method calls) and the entry and exit of each method
execution.

There are several benefits on this, but the two I appreciate the most is to
get an (possibly detailed) behavior overview of a program, and to see
where the program spent more time (a sort of performance analysis).

Is anyone already tried to do this type of tracing within the gnustep project?

Is there any kind of support in the libobjc2 runtime to do this type of tracing,
with timestamped events?

Thanks
Lucas