Testing Environment

[larryk85]

Small design document to discuss the testing framework extensions to CDT and antler-run.

[nathanielhourt]

It was mentioned in a discussion on #88 that perhaps it would be worth adding benchmarking capabilities to the VM as part of this initiative. I would love to see that, as I was not able to find, in an admittedly cursory search, any ability to get high resolution time within the VM.

Having the ability to do this would be highly beneficial for contract authors as well as blockchain implementors, as code optimization becomes critical in order to complete actions within the execution deadlines as contract usage scales. It would also be ideal if this high resolution time could be acquired without needing to make an intrinsic call, as the overhead of intrinsic calls is one of the things that needs to be measured, so an ideal approach may be, for instance, a WASM equivalent of x86's rdtsc instruction.