[Rusky]

True, I forgot about Graal. IIUC though that's somewhat different from what WebAssembly has done- Graal doesn't define any sort of stable compiler target for C, or produce JVM bytecode from C, but instead (via Truffle) JITs C source or LLVM IR via partial evaluation, right?

That would suggest (again IIUC) Graal/Truffle as a mechanism for using the JVM as a WebAssembly runtime. The WebAssembly format and its associated environment/binding system are a portable way to encode C binaries, with significant benefits over JVM bytecode- that's probably the comparison I should have made.

[chrisseaton]

No that's right, the stable compiler target is someone else's job.

But I wasn't comparing to WebAssembly, so you'll need to argue that point with someone else.

You could build a WebAssembly interpreter on Truffle, yes. I'm not sure anyone's tried it yet so that project is available.