wabt

Big fan of this author's work. They have a Gameboy emulator written in C, which can be compiled to WASM and run in the browser. https://github.com/binji/binjgb I learned a lot from the code. Also I love this project with a bunch of demos in hand-written WebAssembly Text (WAT) format, which is like low-level Lisp that works only with raw memory, numbers, and minimal syntax. https://github.com/binji/raw-wasm Then I discovered the same author is quite active in the WebAssembly ecosystem, including specs and tooling. Fascinating stuff! https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

> a single-file distribution literally won't be possible Actually. You could compile the Rust into Wasm, then the Wasm into C. Firefox did this last year [1], so the tools exist and it's neither totally impossible nor totally stupid. The penalty is less than JITting or interpreting Wasm. wasm2c is the tool they apparently used in 2021. [2] [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again... [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/tree/main/wasm2c > wasm2c takes a WebAssembly module and produces an equivalent C source and header.

> - A way way better tooling story. I think this is a real paint point of WebAssembly but it's getting better. You can now compile C/C++ code to WASM using clang as it became a first class citizen in v8 (or later?). Of course, clang does not provide all the runtime goodies that emscripten does but if you limit yourself to use WASM for some part of your code that require performance then all you need to provide is a few Javascript glue code. For prototyping purposes I've bundle an npm package that bring clang to your frontend project without the need to install it through a package [0]. Chrome debugger now support WASM [1] but you still need to install an extension. I've started to work on a way to convert the DWARF symbols from the WASM binary into sourcemap on the fly [2][3] but it still rough around the edge and need some work but it ca

This seems really odd to me. If it's possible to convert wasm to C[1], then it should be possible to convert wasm to asm.js and just execute that. That may not be ideal, but surely it's a better stopgap solution than letting the happy path fail for years on end. 1: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/tree/main/wasm2c

You can also target C through Wasm. https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/tree/main/wasm2c