Скачать или смотреть Wasm Research Day 2024 – Elizabeth Gilbert, whamm! A WebAssembly Bytecode Instrumentation DSL

The WebAssembly Research Center presents talks from Wasm Research Day 2024.
Speaker: Elizabeth Gilbert
Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Title: whamm! A WebAssembly Bytecode Instrumentation DSL
Abstract: Debugging and profiling programs are an integral part of engineering software. This is done through instrumenting the program under observation (inserting instructions that provide insight into dynamic execution). The most-common instrumentation techniques, such as bytecode rewriting, inject instructions directly into the application code. While this method enables instrumentation to support any application domain, it intrudes on the program state space (possibly introducing bugs), complicates the implementation, limits the scope of observation, and cannot dynamically adapt to program behavior. Instead, one can remedy these bytecode rewriting issues by interfacing with a runtime engine that directly supports instrumentation. This technique can bring powerful capabilities into play as demonstrated by the Wizard research engine, in a recent ASPLOS paper. This paper demonstrated how to build instrumentation support that protects the application-under-observation, provides consistency guarantees to enable composable tooling, applies JIT optimizations specific to instrumentation that make some tools run even faster than bytecode rewriting, and more. However, this technique is not as widely-used as bytecode rewriting since it limits a tool’s scope to applications that can run on such engines. This talk presents the design of a new instrumentation DSL for WebAssembly that abstracts above the instrumentation technique to enable developer tooling to support a broad domain of applications while leveraging runtime capabilities as-available without reimplementation.