[Dev Tools] Best practices for debug/trace of contract calls

[coffeexcoin]

Team or Project

Abstract

ZK chain

Abstract

Environment

Testnet

Select the Dev Tool you are using

Foundry

Provide the version of the tool (if applicable)

cast 0.0.4 (ae913af 2025-01-24T00:24:38.741062000Z)

Provide a brief description of the functionality you're trying to implement and the issue you are running into.

Can someone provide guidance on best practices for easily viewing contract traces/simulating calls on zk stack chains?

I am very used to being able to use cast call --trace which produces extremely clean output like this:

Unfortunately cast call --trace does not actually show traces on zk-stack.

The current method I have for tracing calls is to use

cast rpc debug_traceCall -r $RPC_URL -w '[
    {
        "from": "$FROM", 
        "to": "$TO", 
        "data": "$DATA" 
    }
]' | jq

This produces a massive json output, including system contract calls which are largely irrelevant for app contract troubleshooting.

Is there a better way to debug contract calls?

Repo Link (Optional)

No response

Additional Details

No response

[dutterbutter]

Hey 👋

A couple points here that you can expect very soon!

1. We are actively adding cast call support for foundry-zksync 0.0.9 #917. This will unblock adding support for --trace option.
2. We are updating anvil-zksync to include Foundry style traces for both user, system, and precompile call traces in either the next release (0.3.1 or 0.3.2). #577 as described in proposal #576
3. We are updating anvil-zksync to include verbose and actionable error handling for revert and halt cases #571

We are hoping these developments are completed, and released as soon as possible.

[coffeexcoin]

Hey Dustin - any updates when the above will be released? I see running foundryup-zksync that anvil-zksync is bumped to 0.3.2 but forge and cast are still on 0.0.4 - presumably there's an 0.0.5 thru 0.0.8 coming before the 0.0.9 you mentioned?