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...
