Getting started with WebAssembly

Though WebAssembly modules can be written by hand, it is not advisable to do so, as the code is hard to maintain and is not human-friendly. It is a pretty low-level language and, as a result, creating complex applications using raw wasm code can be challenging and time-consuming. Instead, it is often compiled to, or generated from, a variety of languages. Let's look at the available tools that we can use to explore the details of how WebAssembly programs are written and run.

Trying it out online

Before we discuss how WebAssembly is used as a compilation target across different language ecosystems, we can explore it online without requiring any kind of setup on our machine. Some tools that...