Scaling Distributed Tracing on Android With a Kotlin IR Compiler Plugin

on YouTube ↗40m

" summary

Builds a Kotlin IR compiler plugin that rewrites function bodies at compile time to wrap methods in structured trace spans and automatically handle lifecycle, sampling and exporters to Sentry, Perfetto, Firebase Performance or internal warehouses. Instrumentation requires one annotation on a method or class; suspend functions work without extra handling. The implementation is compact—four files and ~300 lines—adds a small build-time cost, runs in production across golden flows, and cuts root-cause time from days to hours by surfacing the exact slow span.

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" chapters (8)

1. 0:00Distributed tracing on Android
2. 7:24Cost of manual span instrumentation
3. 10:56Auto-instrumenting Kotlin with compiler plugins
4. 16:18How compiler rewrites code
5. 20:54Testing and deploying tracing plugin
6. 25:53Performance impact and production use
7. 30:06Other compiler plugin use cases
8. 33:13Q&A

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