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by sulizilxia 3191 days ago
I wonder how this will affect Java in the long term. In the comments about the JDK9 release, there was discussion about the JVM becoming a sort of language-agnostic platform where Java is a small part. It seems WebAssembly is occupying a lot of the same space, but from a sort of opposite direction (in the sense of providing the compilation target first).

Java and the JVM obviously aren't going anywhere soon, but the history of javascript, node.js, etc. leads me to suspect WebAssembly could displace the JVM in the long term.
2 comments
austincheney 3191 days ago
Java is a language. It comes with a standard VM, compile mechanism, and bytecode. Fortunately, the Java platform is well segmented so that the language is a separate technology from those other pieces. Scala, for example, is a language different from Java, but still targets the compile mechanism and JVM.

WebAssembly, by contrast, is not a language. It is only a bytecode and conforming container. Java could compile to WebAssembly instead of its standard bytecode and the biggest difference is execution environment. In order for WebAssembly to displace the JVM it would have to run where the JVM can run with appropriate levels of support.

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sulizilxia 3191 days ago
I was a little unclear about this, but I meant Java in the broad sense of the Java ecosystem, including the JVM and the language. I was mostly wondering if languages will move toward WebAssembly as a target instead of the JVM, and what consequences that will have.

On the other hand, maybe I had Java the language in mind unconsciously at some level. You're right that you could have Java targeting WebAssembly instead of its standard bytecode, which I hadn't thought about.

At least now, it seems like the JVM offers some stuff that WebAssembly doesn't, but I have a hunch it won't stay that way in the long run.

There's been a lot of good discussion here about WebAssembly versus the JVM; it seems like lots of people have similar thoughts about this topic.

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kodablah 3191 days ago
In many ways, the JVM bytecode is a superset of WASM. That's why I wrote https://github.com/cretz/asmble.
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sulizilxia 3191 days ago
Interesting--this seems forward-thinking and useful.
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