WebAssembly and the Future of the JVM Ecosystem by Andrea Peruffo @ Spring I/O 2026

This talk explores the emerging role of WebAssembly as a portable, sandboxed runtime that can be embedded directly inside the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The speaker discusses practical implementations, such as QuickJs4J which runs the QuickJS engine within Java applications, and SQLite4J which executes SQLite compiled to WebAssembly without relying on platform-specific JNI binaries. By demonstrating the capabilities for Java and Spring developers, the session covers how to embed Wasm runtimes in JVM applications, compares this model with JNI and traditional scripting engines, and examines architectural use cases like plugin systems and policy engines. WebAssembly is positioned as a technology that extends Java rather than replaces it, fundamentally reshaping safe execution within the JVM.