Mozilla is developing an online IDE for the WebAssembly portable code format. The beta version is now available.
Called WebAssembly Studio, the IDE is intended to help developers learn and teach others about WebAssembly, which is also called Wasm. The code format promises to speed web application performance and has the support of major browser vendors, including Mozilla.
The features in WebAssembly Studio beta
The IDE project began in late 2017 when developers tried to merge two existing tools, WasmExplorer and WasmFiddle.
Features of the WebAssembly IDE include:
- Support for the C, C++, and Rust languages. This support is now classified as primitive but should improve in subsequent betas. Compilation is mostly done server-side but plans call for doing more of this client-side. Plans also call for enabling support of any language that compiles to WebAssembly.
- Editing of WebAssembly binary modules and test files.
- Accessible tools, with many features offered in contextual menus.
- Interactive embedding of WebAssembly Studio projects via the embedly system for embedding content.
For C and C++, the LLVM compiler back end is used but support for the Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler is under consideration. Improvements also are planned for the user experience, performance, and error reporting, as is the ability to download and build WebAssembly Studio projects locally using familiar tools.
Where to download WebAssembly Studio
You can download WebAssembly Studio source code from GitHub. You can try out the WebAssembly Studio IDE online as well.