WasmView: Visual Testing for WebAssembly Applications

Abstract

WebAssembly is the newest language to arrive on the web. It features a binary code format to serve as a compilation target for native languages such as C, C++, and Rust and allows native applications to be ported for web usage. In the current implementation, WebAssembly requires interaction with JavaScript at a minimum to initialize and additionally to interact with Web APIs. As a result, understanding the function calls between WebAssembly and JavaScript is crucial for testing, debugging, and maintaining applications utilizing this new language. To this end, we develop a tool, WasmView, to visualize function calls made between WebAssembly and JavaScript in a web application. WasmView also records the stack traces and screenshots of applications. This tool can help in supporting visual testing for interactive applications and assisting refactoring for code updates. The demo video for WasmView can be viewed at https://youtu.be/kjKxL7L7zxI and the source code can be found at https://github.com/wasmview/wasmview.github.io.