>crucially their modification of the TeX engine seems to be distributed only as the two `.wasm` binary files
I thought one of the selling points of webassembly is that wasm files must have a textual format that anyone can read the source.
I thought one of the selling points of webassembly is that wasm files must have a textual format that anyone can read the source.
We reached a point where everyone was distributing browser code as minimized javascript to the point where reading the source of web pages wasn't really meaningful anymore. At least this way you can technically read the webassembly in something that is standardized. Anything can still be obfuscated though. The idea of a pure, readable webpages is long gone, but if they made the code clean and didn't do any trickery then it's still possible to read if you know the format.
Open and debuggable
WebAssembly is designed to be pretty-printed in a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, and writing programs by hand. The textual format will be used when viewing the source of Wasm modules on the web.
Will WebAssembly support View Source on the Web?
Yes! WebAssembly defines a text format to be rendered when developers view the source of a WebAssembly module in any developer tool. Also, a specific goal of the text format is to allow developers to write WebAssembly modules by hand for testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning and teaching purposes. In fact, by dropping all the coercions required by asm.js validation, the WebAssembly text format should be much more natural to read and write than asm.js. Outside the browser, command-line and online tools that convert between text and binary will also be made readily available. Lastly, a scalable form of source maps is also being considered as part of the WebAssembly tooling story.