New cmdline option `wasmer create-exe --self-test`

[NobodyXu]

Motivation

wasmer create-exe requires WASMER_DIR to be set to the location of the Wasmer installation and it also requires at least compiler cc and linker ld to be present.

In case where cross compilation is required, it would also need zig-cc to be present.

Proposed solution

I want to use wasm create-exe in https://github.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/issues/246 and having wasm create-exe --self-test that returns 0 on success would perfectly fix this issue, not only for cargo-binstall but also for other scripting usage of wasm create-exe.

Alternatives

We can use wasm create-exe to compile a simple hello-world wasi program to verify that it is usable, but that requires a simple hello-world wasi to be embedded in the program and compiling this program might also take a lot of computation resource and make the program sluggish.

Additional context

This feature request is first mentioned in https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/3053#issuecomment-1210736435

[NobodyXu]

Errors are thrown if some component needed for create-exe is missing, to make this scriptable we can assign exit code numbers for each kind of error so that it can be part of an automated system.

So running wasmer create-exe with no argument will also gives error if something is missing?

[NobodyXu]

@epilys So we still need "--self-test", but that won't be hard because wasmer already throw errors on missing components?

[syrusakbary]

If we have wasmer create-exe properly running and returning successful errors, I'm not sure we'll need --self-test. Perhaps we need to add more extra tests into our CI

[NobodyXu]

If we have wasmer create-exe properly running and returning successful errors, I'm not sure we'll need --self-test.

I propose --self-test because I don't want to compile a hello-world program just to figure out whether the host can run wasmer create-exe or not.

[fschutt]

Okay, thanks @NobodyXu, we weren't sure what the motivation for this issue was. I'll discuss it further with @syrusakbary, we will get back to you.

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[stale[bot]]

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