There are many editors and tools available to simplify the development process. Fortunately, C/C++ and JavaScript have been around for quite some time, so you can take advantage of the options that suit you best. The list of tools for WebAssembly is considerably shorter, given the shorter duration of which the technology has existed, but they are out there.

The primary tool we'll use, VS Code, offers some excellent and useful features for simplifying the build and development process. In addition to using it for writing our code, we'll utilize VS Code's built-in Tasks feature to build the .wasm file from C/C++. By creating a .vscode/tasks.json file in the project root folder, we're able to specify all of the parameters associated with the build step and run it quickly using a keyboard shortcut. In addition to performing a build, we can start and stop a running Node.js process (that is, the local server in the workflow diagram). We'll cover how to add and configure these features in the next chapter.