WASM was explicitly designed to be human readable and human editable. The WAT format wouldn't have been created if that wasn't the intention[0]. That's a lot of

WASM was explicitly designed to be human readable and human editable. The WAT format wouldn't have been created if that wasn't the intention[0]. That's a lot of effort being invested into readability, and it would have been a lot simpler to just create the binary format and not worry about syntax or WAT compilers if humans weren't meant to be able to read and debug the final product. Of course I wouldn't write web assembly by hand normally for most projects, but I also wouldn't create a blanket rule that it should be discouraged across the board. It's another language that goes through a compile process, just a very specialized one, like assembly. [0]: https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/text/index.html https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/text/index.html