Four Approaches to Debugging Server-side WebAssembly

Four Approaches to Debugging Server-side WebAssembly

摘要

Shopify Functions enables customizing the business logic of Shopify’s back end with server-side WebAssembly. There are many benefits to using a WebAssembly environment to host these customizations such as low cold-start latency and robust security compared to other alternatives. However, WebAssembly poses new challenges when debugging. These challenges aren’t unique to Shopify Functions and are common to other uses of WebAssembly including other server-side use cases. One of these challenges is a less refined developer experience when using step debuggers.

Step debuggers allow developers to pause execution on certain lines of code given certain conditions, execute lines of code one at a time, descend and ascend the current callstack, and see the values of in-scope variables at a particular point in execution. This flexibility can reduce the amount of time it takes to find a problem compared to debugging with print or log statements or studying the code. Some examples of step debuggers are GDB, LLDB, and the Visual Studio Debugger.