Strace was originally written for SunOS by Paul Kranenburg in 1991, according to its copyright notice, and published early in 1992, in volume three of comp.sources.sun.

strace(1) is a useful utility to sort of debug programs for which no source is available which unfortunately includes almost all of the Sun supplied system software.

During his tenure, strace development migrated to CVS; ports to FreeBSD and many architectures on Linux (including ARM, IA-64, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, s390, SPARC) were introduced.

Since then, strace gained support for several new Linux architectures (AMD64, s390x, SuperH), bi-architecture support for some of them, and received numerous additions and improvements in syscalls decoders on Linux; strace development migrated to git during that period.

strace gained support for AArch64, ARC, AVR32, Blackfin, Meta, Nios II, OpenSISC 1000, RISC-V, Tile/TileGx, Xtensa architectures since that time.

The last version of strace that had some (evidently dead)[10] code for non-Linux operating systems was 4.6, released in March 2011.