ptrace is too low level and will freeze your process. it cant be used for production debugging i feel.

we work at the application layer by hooking into production grade tooling if available (inspector in v8, sys.monitoring in python) or bytecode manipulation(jvm)

since we arent controlling the application for a different process, we dont need to freeze the app to get the current app state

requirements we had in mind in order of importance

1. safety -> user app needs to function as usual no matter what happens, there shouldnt be an error in the user's app because of us

2. zero idle footprint -> if no probe is active, cpu/memory differency in the user app should be immeasurable

3. zero latency footprint at non probe paths while other probes are active

4. measure mem/cpu footprint directly or via a proxy like eventloop lag and have guardrails around it. suspend probes or even lose snapshot data if guardrail conditions meet

5. minimal mem/cpu footprint for active probes

6. minimal latency foot print for active probe paths