WABT and Binaryen
WABT and Binaryen allow developers to work with source files and develop tooling for WebAssembly. If you're interested in working with WebAssembly at a lower level, these tools provide the means for accomplishing such a goal. In this section, we'll evaluate these tools in greater detail and review the purpose and capabilities of each one.
WABT – the WebAssembly binary toolkit
WABT's focus is on the manipulation of WebAssembly binary (.wasm
) files and text (.wat
) files, as well as conversion between the two formats. WABT provides tools to translate Wat to Wasm (wat2wasm) and vice versa (wasm2wat), as well as a tool to convert a Wasm file to a C source and header file (wasm2c). You can view the entire list of tools in the README file of the WABT GitHub repository at https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt.
One example use case of WABT is the WebAssembly Toolkit for VS Code extension we installed in Chapter 3, Setting Up a Development Environment. The extension depends on WABT to...