Jordan Rome

It may seem strange that a language that prides itself on terseness didn’t have a way to reduce duplicate code. These days almost all popular, general-purpose programming languages provide at least one mechanism for this: functions, macros, gotos, etc. But bpftrace is a domain-specific language (DSL); known for one-liners. But it seems people have started to write long bpftrace programs (have you seen bpfsnake?) and, as a result, started to crave the ability to not repeat themselves in order to reduce errors, reading, and writing.

This post is about the journey to adding macros to bpftrace.