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They're not doing so here, but shipping a wasm-compiled binary with npm that uses node's WASI API is a really easy way to ship a cross-platform CLI utility. Just needs ~20 lines of JS wrapping it to set up the args and file system.

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Doesn’t this seem excessive over just using rust’s cross platform builds?

There's no such thing as a truly "cross-platform" build. Depending on what you use, you might have to target specific combinations of OS and processor architecture. That's actually why WASM (though they went with WASI) is a better choice; especially for libraries, since anyone can drop it into their environment without worrying about compatibility.

there’s 3 os and 2 architectures minus darwin-amd64 so you just need to do 5 builds to avoid the WASM performance tax.

(freebsd runs linux binaries and the openbsd people probably want to build from source anyways)

I think GP's point is that instead of having 3 target-specific rust-built binaries, they have 3 target-specific node binaries running rust-built wasm plus wrapper code.

Can you link to a sample of how I can do this?

https://axodotdev.github.io/cargo-dist/

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