Show HN: WebAssembly Instrumentation in the Wizard Research Engine
github.com
I've been working on research tools for Wasm for some time now, and just today we put up the pre-print for our newest paper "Flexible Non-intrusive Dynamic Instrumentation for WebAssembly" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07973), which will appear in ASPLOS 2024. Two previous papers, one about Wizard's interpreter (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563311) and one about the JIT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13241) have been discussed on HN before.
This new paper explains what Wizard is really about: dynamic instrumentation of Wasm programs, without modifying the program or its behavior. Wizard can do this with a flexible callback API (probes) that are supported, and indeed optimized, in all of Wizard's execution tiers.
We'd be interested in more feedback, more people kicking the tires, and ideas for more dynamic analyses that can be built through its APIs. It's pretty easy to write a new monitor that instruments and studies programs; this is what we expect people will want to do very often. And of course we'd welcome contributions of useful monitors back to Wizard's repo.
(This post is also part apology in that I suck at marketing and documentation--I'm deep in compilers most of the time!).