Evolving a DSL: How bpftrace makes language design decisions

On its face, bpftrace is a simple DSL/tracing-tool for writing BPF programs. It abstracts away a lot of the complicated user and kernel space code neccessary to write observability and debugging programs. However, adding new language features/syntax isn't easy. There are a lot of considerations to be made in regards to bpftrace's primary usecases and the classic problem of how much complexity/details to hide from the user. This talk will explore some recent case studies (e.g. adding "let") and discuss some of the challenges of evolving this DSL.