[TekMol]

Do browsers that support WASM support reading the text format?

If not, this could be useful to write WASM directly.

In the article, the links under "The parsing is available for the following formats:" are broken. Does anybody know where they should point to?

As soon as it is possible to write WASM directly and have it execute it by the browser, I would start trying it out. I hope somebody will come up with a better textual representation then the currently proposed one with all the parenthesis.

[pjmlp]

You can already play with WASM directly in the browser.

https://wasdk.github.io/WasmFiddle/

https://mbebenita.github.io/WasmExplorer/

I prefer the explorer one.

The s-exp representation is great for doing compiler development, hence why it was chosen.

[krapp]

WASM is bytecode and a spec - writing it by hand would make as much sense as writing an executable binary in assembly. You could do it that way, but it kind of defeats the point, and writing anything nontrivial becomes impractical.

Write something in a language that targets WASM and compile to it - it's an easier way of accomplishing the same end result, and that's what it's for.

[xtuc]

Browsers won't support it, that's a good point. Note that WAST (text) is much more bigger than WASM (binary).