I think you've accidentally set up a straw man because mentions of low level tools don't correlate to use. In fact "trending" popularity is how a lot of bad te

I think you've accidentally set up a straw man because mentions of low level tools don't correlate to use. In fact "trending" popularity is how a lot of bad technical decisions are made, cue crappy database flavor of the month. The hammer is a pretty useful tool but builders don't blog du jour about how elegant combining the strike face and nail puller on one implement are. None the less, millions are used every day. DTrace is used extensively in FreeBSD development these days. It's being used to bring up new generations of Systems Programmers: http://teachbsd.org/ http://teachbsd.org/ My team uses DTrace to develop TCP, which ensures open standards and a copyfree implementation that ends up in Apple products, Juniper, NetApp, and who knows where else. Of course, also Netflix and the large CDN I work for which run at least 1/3 of North American Internet volume. We also use DTrace to fix the reference copyfree Intel drivers, which may in a small way pay back Illumos for the awesome tech they share. I think those end up in some popular embedded microkernels too. I grin thinking about people that emphasize "GNU/Linux", but I will empathize with FSF for a moment to show that low level software is not particularly exciting to most. GCC and GDB are hugely influential tools for the whole open source ecosystem, especially the high growth during the 80s and 90s that led to "Enterprise" acceptance. It's hard to imagine where everyone else would be, including the BSDs and many chip companies, were it not for the GNU toolchain. Nonetheless, most people just begrudgingly use these and hope they don't give them any trouble because of course they are usually trying to do something else.