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Comment by rocmcd | Hacker News Reader

100%. Context propagation is _the_ key to distributed tracing, otherwise you're only seeing one side of every transaction.

I was hoping odigos was language/runtime-agnostic since it's eBPF-based, but I see it's mentioned in the repo that it only supports:

> Java, Python, .NET, Node.js, and Go

Apart from Go (that is a WIP), these are the languages already supported with Otel's (non-eBPF-based) auto-instrumentation. Apart from a win on latency (which is nice, but could in theory be combated with sampling), why else go this route?

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eBPF instrumentation does not require code changes, redeployment or restart to running applications.

We are constantly adding more language support for eBPF instrumentation and are aiming to cover the most popular programming languages soon.

Btw, not sure that sampling is really the solution to combat overhead, after all you probably do want that data. Trying to fix production issue when the data you need is missing due to sampling is not fun

All good points, thank you.

What's the limit on language support? Is it theoretically possible to support any language/runtime? Or does it come down to the protocol (HTTP, gRPC, etc) being used by the communicating processes?

We already solved compiled languages (Go, C, Rust) and JIT languages (Java, C#). Interpreted languages (Python, JS) are the only ones left, hopefully we will solve these as well soon. The big challenge is supporting all the different runtimes, once that is solved implementing support for different protocols / open-source libraries is not as complicated.

Got to get PHP on that list :)

FWIW it's theoretically possible to support any language/runtime, but since eBPF is operating at the level it's at, there's no magic abstraction layer to plug into. Every runtime and/or protocol involves different segments of memory and certain bytes meaning certain things. It's all in service towards having no additional requirements for an end-user to install, but once you're in eBPF world everything is runtime-and-protocol-and-library-specific.

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