WASM Tooling — A Practical Cheat Sheet
The WebAssembly ecosystem has accumulated a solid set of command-line tools that don’t get surfaced well in most introductory material. Tutorials tend to focus on one language path — Rust via wasm-pack, or Go, or Emscripten — and leave the broader toolchain unexplained. This is a reference for the tools I reach for regularly: inspection, compilation, optimisation, and runtimes.
The Text Format — WAT
Before the tools: WASM has two representations. The binary format (.wasm) is what the runtime executes. The text format (.wat) is human-readable S-expression syntax — the assembly language of WebAssembly. Understanding WAT is useful for debugging and for writing minimal WASM by hand.