I don&#x27;t know what you mean exactly by &quot;expensive&quot;, but the time spent in profiling code should obviously not be counted, and it is quite simple to do so.<p>The real point I&#x27;m trying to make is that tracepoints <i>do not require any changes to the original code</i>. They are entirely opt-in and if you do not choose to use them, your application won&#x27;t have this extra useless code compiled into it.<p>That said, the few times I&#x27;ve had to use Visual Studio&#x27;s tracepoints, they were <i>horribly slow</i>. Apparently this is &quot;by design&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;connect.microsoft.com&#x2F;VisualStudio&#x2F;feedback&#x2F;details&#x2F;934631&#x2F;tracepoints-feature-is-very-slow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;connect.microsoft.com&#x2F;VisualStudio&#x2F;feedback&#x2F;details&#x2F;...</a><p>Being an RE, I&#x27;ve implemented and used simple tracers that were more than 100x faster than VS&#x27; on hardware not quite as fast as that today (around a decade ago). Watching variables in memory and CPU registers changing in near-realtime is something I very much miss when I have to work in higher-level languages...