Foundary style VM test tracing, native actor tooling brainstorm

[ZenGround0]

Solidity tooling is quite good and should inspire us to do better for native FVM actor development starting with the builtin actors. I'm using the foundry toolset and particulary forge which is essentially cargo for solidity and its test tracing looks as below:

This should be feasible to add to builtin actors vm testing as we already have most of the data inside the invocation context used internall. Maybe a variant for unit test is worth pursuing too.

A tool like foundary would be a great thing to target for general native actor development. We have a great first use case of improving builtin actor development experience to develop against. Then tools could be released for the broader development community.

[anorth]

See also https://github.com/filecoin-project/ref-fvm/issues/1080. I agree we should be able to get this all with a fake VM, but it would be ace to use a common tracing structure etc with actual VM tests too

[jennijuju]

@anorth am I right to assume this is the effort that's described as the AI in https://github.com/filecoin-project/FIPs/discussions/535 & should land upon nv18? if so - id like to assign the issue and have it on our board

[anorth]

This issue isn't (because no gas metering), but it's related.

I think this issue is intended as brainstorm/discussion rather than being concretely actionable (yet).