WebAssembly / Wasm and Java

airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien

An airhacks.fm conversation with Fabio Niephaus (@fniephaus) about:

GraalVM polyglot capabilities now available as Maven dependencies without requiring GraalVM JDK, running WebAssembly modules in Java applications using GraalWasm, separation of polyglot runtime from GraalVM distribution, embedding use cases for extending Java applications with python JavaScript and WebAssembly, performance benefits when running on GraalVM vs openJDK through automatic JIT optimization, WebAssembly as portable compilation target for multiple languages including rust C++ Go, WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) enabling file and network operations, advantages over JNI/Panama FFI for native extensions due to portability and sandboxing, multi-threading support with context pools for high throughput, using JavaScript bindings as intermediary for high-level Java-WASM interactions, future component model with WIT (WebAssembly Interface Types) for language-agnostic interfaces, security benefits of sandboxed execution for untrusted code, WebImage preview feature compiling Java bytecode to WebAssembly modules, javac demo running Java compiler in browser, command-line tools converted to web applications using WebImage, Edge Computing use cases for user-defined functions, native image compatibility with GraalWasm, Pyodide integration possibilities for secure Python native extensions, Spring Shell successfully compiled to WASM demonstrating framework compatibility, ongoing work on threading networking and WASI support for full server-side capabilities, collaboration with WebAssembly community and Bytecode Alliance, WASM GC proposal for efficient garbage collection, bringing dynamic class loading to native image, GraalWasm demos and guides, javac on Wasm live demo, javac on Wasm demo code, Web Image talk at Wasm.io 2025, GraalVM Web Image sources, GDK Launcher, GraalPy, GraalPy demos and guides

Fabio Niephaus on twitter: @fniephaus