WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide

Appendix. Installing WebAssembly Tools

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

Steve Jobs

It is unsurprising, given all of the languages, tools, and frameworks that we discuss in this book, that there is a fair amount to install. This appendix will not be comprehensive, but will try to point you in the right direction to getting everything going. Some of the tools are easier to install on Linux or macOS, but most should work on Windows too.

Installing WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT)

The WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT) provides a suite of tools for converting things to and from the various formats we have discussed as well as several others. It includes tools for dumping out details about the modules, validating their structures, and more.

There are quite good instructions on the GitHub repo for building on all three major operating systems, so there is no point in replicating that here. The repo is located here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

One thing I did want to point out was that some of the tools are also available online. It shouldn’t be too surprising that WebAssembly tools might also run in the browser. If you want to try converting formats without installing the tools, you can try them out here: https://webassembly.github.io/wabt/demo

Additionally, there is a spin-off project called Wabt.js that allows you to use much ...