wapm-cli VS libarchivejs

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

7z/RAR/TAR Extraction via Libarchivejs

Another operation that is sometimes desired is to take several files and give the user a compressed file. There are actually a surprisingly large amount (jszip, pako) of client side options here, but my favorite so far when it comes to speed, size and working with .zip has been fflate. But if you'd like to work with other formats, there are also libraries to decompress 7-Zip, RAR & TAR.