Ideas around benchmarking in tests

[Quantumplation]

The recent implementation of label for the property based testing gave me some inspiration.

For those not familiar, the way the label works internally is by prefixing the trace with a certain non-printable character that is unlikely to appear in normal traces; It can then pick this up, and handle it specially during property tests.

A similar trick could be used to trace out the spent budget:

  trace_budget()

Prints out some non-printable trace statement; when the emulator sees that trace, it can make a note of the current budget, and then when printing out the traces later, print out the budget as of that line.

Similarly, you could do

  trace_budget_start("Calculate Fees")
  trace_budget_end("Calculate Fees")

Which the emulator can then substitute the ending line with the difference between the spent budget at those two nodes.

A more robust implementation would be to have a set of test only builtins that are purpose built for these tasks. This could be useful for other things in general, like debugger breakpoints, aiken-line-number traces, etc. They get omitted when compiling the code in release mode, but appear when compiling for tests or for debugging.