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Text Format

The purpose of this text format is to support:

  • View Source on a WebAssembly module, thus fitting into the Web (where every source can be viewed) in a natural way.
  • Presentation in browser development tools when source maps aren't present (which is necessarily the case with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)).
  • Writing WebAssembly code directly for reasons including pedagogical, experimental, debugging, optimization, and testing of the spec itself.

The text format is equivalent and isomorphic to the binary format.

The text format will be standardized, but only for tooling purposes:

  • Compilers will support this format for .S and inline assembly.
  • Debuggers and profilers will present binary code using this textual format.
  • Browsers will not parse the textual format on regular web content in order to implement WebAssembly semantics.

Given that the code representation is actually an Abstract Syntax Tree, the syntax would contain nested statements and expressions (instead of the linear list of instructions most assembly languages have).

There is no requirement to use JavaScript syntax; this format is not intended to be evaluated or translated directly into JavaScript.