Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio

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I have to say I am pretty excited about WebAssembly.

I've been through many programming languages. C# might be my favourite and F# always seemed like it would be if I took the time to learn it properly but for quite a few years now, JS has simply had such gravitational pull that I felt like I had to go with it. And I have to say, I've learned to not only like but to love it. Save for the mutable data structures that it supplies per default, it offers solid functional programming features and the culture embraces those. Still, there are times where I wish I could use something else.

NPM features quite a few packages written in other languages, with JS "binaries" available which I think is pretty neat. To me, packages seem like a much nicer place to choose language rather than, say, per microservice. A parser might be much cleaner in some pure functional language while some I/O library might work better in something else. But there is still only a subset of languages that compile to JS and the quality varies. But with LLVM supporting WebAssembly, I can see a future where it truly becomes the global binary format. Which would allow you to either write a combination of desktop, mobile and web apps (plus backend) in any language of your choice. Or, easliy write different packages in different languages and combine them into one app.

not bad, but four(4) config files for a single code file?

Where do you see 4? I see package.json only. Arguably the build script. And that number doesn't increase at all with more code.

The number of files is exactly the same as if you weren't using webassembly, other than the one rust/c source file.

Bytecode formats as portable binaries have always been a thing on the mainframe world all the way back to the 60's, it has just taken quite a few decades to become commodity across mobile, desktop and web worlds.