Clever.

Java seems to have come a long way since 2015. Might be worth looking into, if only I could find a page that summarizes every new language feature.

As a matter of fact we have internally achieved 1.16.5.

The Java side of things works out-of-the-box, but LWJGL3 JNI code uses some subtle techniques that are yet supported in public builds of CheerpJ.

Now that we have Java 17 support we expect to be able to move even further.

The target of the JIT compiler is indeed JavaScript, since WasmGC is still too limited.

This is fundamentally an implementation detail though, when we adopt WasmGC there will be no user visible change beside a potential performance improvement

There ought be a fair amount of legacy Java code sitting in enterprises that they would be willing to pay for an Oracle® seal of approval for running parts in the browser.

May be they are aiming for graalvm to be the answer eventually. (actually I don't know whether graalvm in the browser is effectively aot and brings all the reflection/dynamic code issues with it.) Curious if someone knowledgeable in that ecosystem knows.

Nooo! I spent a summer in college writing physics education applets. The scars are still there.

Seriously, I do wonder what the real value of some of this WASM stuff is. I mean, seems cool to run a java (or rust or <insert language here>) app in the browser, but what is the real world use case? If I run an app in the browser, I still have to do all the server side business validation because "you should never trust the client".

What am I missing?

Edit: on reading other comments, apparently this is direct-to-js compilation, not WASM. The intent of the comment still stands.

> Applets were executed completely outside of the browser sandbox. An absolute disaster from the security standpoint.

It is easy to forget Java (applets, web start) was a thing during the Windows 98 era, meaning a time when there was (almost?) no security. People were downloading and running random .exe files all the time.

There was no browser sandboxing and you could run wild Basic code in IE.

Sun with Java were the first one to try to solve that problem. It was imperfect but way better than what others were doing at the time.

Applets didn’t fail because of missing JRE, it was included in IE. It was only after Microsoft started playing around with the implementation that Sun asked them to stop, which they did. Only then did a missing JRE become an issue.

Thanks! I know kotlin has a JS target, but being able to just deploy the software as-is without a separate codebase for the interface, dealing with all the differences of the platforms etc is something else entirely. Very cool.

Sent straight down to 3rd page from the very first position in home. I assume there must be some internal "send this down to hell" button.

Not OP here, but it did disappear from the frontpage. I was still pondering about it and left this tab open... frankly I can't think of a good use case for it besides making legacy java apps available via browser. For gaming, I'd probably still use Unity or other game engines. For app development, I probably not gonna develop on Java 11 again which the support gonna be ending in 2026. I'm impressed by this project though.

I suspect something else is amiss here, since it is not the first time this happens.

And, in full transparency, we don't engage in any manipulation of upvote count.

We try to play as fair as possible here and in other communities.