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Ajay Kumar
Ajay Kumar

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Debugging Webassembly in browser

Debugging is the process of fixing a bug in the software, it also refers to identifying, analyzing and removing errors. This process begins after the software fails to execute properly and concludes by solving the problem and successfully testing the software.

Why do we need Debugging?
The process of debugging begins as soon as we start coding a software and then it continues in successive stages as code is combined with other units of programming to form a software product.

Benefits of debugging

  • Debugging allows earlier detection of an error that makes a stress-free development process of software.
  • Debugging provides maximum useful information about data structures and allows easy interpretation.
  • Through debugging the developer can avoid complex one-use testing code to save time in software development.

Debugging Strategies
There can be many strategies to start debugging, some of them can be described as such:

  • First of all we need to understand the system in depth because that helps us to construct different representations of systems that are to be debugged.

  • Backward analysis of the problem traces the program backward from the location of the failure message in order to identify the region of faulty code for that we need to study the region of defect thoroughly to find the cause of defects.

  • Forward analysis of the program involves tracking the program forward using Breakpoints or print statements at different points in the program. It is important to focus on the region where the wrong outputs are obtained.

Example

Debugging Webassembly

Let's look at a Simple C program to compute the square of a number:

#include<stdio.h>
int square(int n) {
  return n*n;
}
int main() {
  return 0;
}
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The wasm code (text format) generated through the above program using Wasm Fiddle which is an online compiler to convert our code to WebAssembly, is as such:

(module
 (table 0 anyfunc)
 (memory $0 1)
 (export "memory" (memory $0))
 (export "square" (func $square))
 (export "main" (func $main))
 (func $square (; 0 ;) (param $0 i32) (result i32)
  (i32.mul
   (get_local $0)
   (get_local $0)
  )
 )
 (func $main (; 1 ;) (result i32)
  (i32.const 0)
 )
)
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and the driver script

let square;
fetch("square.wasm").then(bytes => bytes.arrayBuffer())
   .then(mod => WebAssembly.compile(mod))
   .then(module => {return new WebAssembly.Instance(module) })
   .then(instance => {
   square = instance.exports.square(13);
   console.log("The square of 13 = " +square);
   document.getElementById("textcontent").innerHTML = "The square of 13 = " +square;
});
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As we can see there in driver script we had put a break point and start the debugger and executing each and every line and it later lead us to our WebAssembly module where it assigns and computes the square input number and returns output of that number. In the next step it logs out the message The square of 13 = 169.

There are many other ways to debug our program such as printing each and every step, that we will see in later demos.

In next tutorial I will talk about WebAssembly for Non Browsers case or say Web Assembly outside Browsers

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