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Debugging is where real engineering happens, and WebAssembly is reaching the point where “you can instrument it” isn’t good enough. In this episode of WebAssembly Unleashed, Joel Moses and Oscar Spencer sit down with Elizabeth Gilbert, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon, to talk about Whamm: a DSL and framework designed to make instrumentation in Wasm less of a one-off engineering project and more of a repeatable, portable capability.
Elizabeth explains how she arrived at WebAssembly through the developer tooling and fault-injection world, and why existing instrumentation approaches in Wasm often boil down to fragile bytecode rewriting. Whamm reframes the problem as “match and inject,” letting you express instrumentation at a higher level and then compile the probe logic as WebAssembly itself. That means you can write the instrumentation in any language that compiles to Wasm, while Whamm handles the hard parts: matching at opcodes, function entry/exit, branches and branch targets, imports, and other low-level control-flow details that are easy to get wrong.
The conversation also covers an important evolution: running Whamm through an engine interface instead of pure rewriting. In that model, the runtime understands probes as probes, giving stronger isolation guarantees and opening the door to a standardized, portable instrumentation mechanism across engines.
Finally, Elizabeth previews Splicer, her component-model work that can interpose on edges in a component composition graph and visualize those relationships, plus a candid look at where things get hard, especially around resources.
If you care about observability, debugging, security analysis, or performance tooling for WebAssembly, this is a clear look at why the future may be less about more tools and more about better ways to describe instrumentation.
Creators and Guests
Host
Joel Moses
Distinguished Engineer & VP, Strategic Engineering at F5. Joel has over 30 years of industry experience in cybersecurity and networking fields. Prior to joining F5, he designed large scale security and infrastructure architectures for consulting clients and served as the lead US Security and Infrastructure Architect for one of the largest accounting/consulting firms in the world. At F5, he is a founding member of the Office of the CTO, and is principally responsible for advanced research, intellectual property, proof-of-concepts, and strategic studies related to security, hardware, and cloud technologies. He holds several US patents related to encryption techniques.
Host
What is WebAssembly Unleashed?
Welcome to WebAssembly Unleashed, your monthly dive into the dynamic world of WebAssembly (Wasm). Join F5’s Joel Moses, Oscar Spencer, and Wasm enthusiast Matthew Yacobucci as they unpack the potential, challenges, and innovations within the Wasm ecosystem.
Designed for architects, practitioners, technologists, and Wasm enthusiasts, episodes offer:
Insightful discussions on Wasm advancements.
Practical tips for seamless integration into projects.
Interviews with influential figures shaping the Wasm landscape.
Strategies for maximizing the potential of WebAssembly.
Subscribe now and stay abreast of the latest in Wasm development. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or new to the field, WebAssembly Unleashed is your ticket to unlocking the full power of this revolutionary technology. Tune in for a deep dive into the limitless possibilities of WebAssembly.