DEMO AND DISCUSSION: Wasm instrumentation and whamm
Elizabeth Gilbert is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon, doing research on WebAssembly instrumentation. Instrumentation refers to the ability to do dynamic analysis on code while it’s running, such as branch profiling or building out flame graphs. She joined us to share her work on whamm (“Wasm Application Monitoring and Manipulation”), a framework for instrumenting code in a DSL (inspired by DTrace).
Elizabeth shared a demo from the whamm repository that counts calls from high-level events in some Wasm bytecode, using the whamm CLI tool. Check out the demo for more detail!
Bailey and Elizabeth discussed how this work can contribute to use-cases like improved observability in Wasm (add logging and tracing after the fact!), and how she is currently working on applying her instrumentation work to Wasm components.
Brooks proposes that flaky tests have been blocking merge for a lot of substantial, important PRs for too long. He suggests disabling these tests (and filing issues on the tests appropriately) in a targeted way and unblocking these PRs.
Massoud proposes: To reduce the burden of one person checking all PRs, wouldn’t it be better if the PR owners validate the jobs, and report on if the failed testing is related to the topic of the PR or not? The group agrees to discuss further in an issue.
