Endive: A JVM native WebAssembly runtime

Shameless plug: we solved the opposite problem, running any Java application in the browser via WebAssembly: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/cheerpj-4.3

And yes, it does run Minecraft as well :-) https://browsercraft.cheerpj.com/

Projects like this would be significantly funner and easier to make in Jdk25+(well technically 24+) because of the new Java classfile/bytecode API. It looks like Endive uses OW2 ASM, probably because this supports back to Jdk11. The new jdk API has a minimum target of Jdk17. OW2 ASM is significantly harder to use IMHO though.

What got me into this is I just finished a major release of Petrify (https://github.com/exabrial/petrify) that compiles ML Models to JVM Bytecode. It requires Jdk25 to do the compilation, but the compiled models can run on Jdk17+.

I'm looking for more side projects to use the classfile API on.

This is a fork of Chicory, a bit more context of the relationship between the projects can be found here:

https://github.com/dylibso/chicory/issues/1296

On the CNCF wasmCloud Community call this week we played with this: - a demonstration of Endive - implemented CNCF wasmCloud host - Integrated into Vert.x as an example

And discussed the roadmap.

Blogpost and video here: https://blog.cosmonic.com/engineering/2026-05-26-diving-into...

Lots of context for this project on the Bytecode Alliance blog: https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/endive-and-the-next-ch...

It will be really great if this becomes a second popular runtime with both GC and WASI component model support. Wasmtime being the only runtime with that combo is a bit concerning. Node supporting the component model will help a lot too.

Is this being handed over to the Bytecode Alliance or is this a hard fork and will diverge from Chicory? It isn't clear from the announcement but I suspect the former.

I guess we can come full circle and eventualy port it to Android Java.

If you haven't seen The Birth & Death of JavaScript, it's well worth a watch:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

See also: https://www.graalvm.org/webassembly/docs/

Finally we can run Kotlin/WASM on desktop! /s