Bug: Spawned child process with hardhat-tracer does not exit

[hwrdtm]

What

When I'm spawning a child process to run with the HRE, eg. npx hardhat run someRandomScript.ts, and with the hardhat-tracer imported in the hardhat.config.ts, I get a different behavior than without the tracer module imported. The different behavior is that, with the tracer imported, the child process does not exit.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Create a file called someRandomScript.ts in a hardhat project:

// someRandomScript.ts
console.log("THIS");

2. Run with npx hardhat run scripts/thing.ts
3. Observe the script just hang.
4. Comment out the console.log
5. Run with the same command in step 2.
6. Observe the script exit gracefully.

Versions

• hardhat@2.15.0
• hardhat-tracer@2.5.1
• node@18.15.0
• yarn@1.22.19

Platform

Macbook Pro 2021
Chip: Apple M1 Pro
OS: macOS Ventura 13.3

[zemse]

This is a behaviour of nodejs when async tasks are not completed or get hanged. There are quite a lot of async tasks, I'll look into this issue which one gets hanged.

But if you are blocked by this problem, as a workaround you can add to the end of someRandomScript.ts:

// .. after your code runs:
process.exit() // this will stop the process ignoring any background pending async tasks if any