When many Java developers hear the word WebAssembly, the first thing they think is “browser technology”. The second thing: “it’s the JVM all over again”. After all, for a Java developer, in-browser apps are prehistory. Indeed, WebAssembly is “a bytecode for the Web”, but the similarities between Java and Wasm really end here.

In this talk, we will compare the WebAssembly spec and WebAssembly runtimes against Java bytecode and the JVM and we will see together why, even as a Java geek, you should still be excited about this technology. In fact, there is more to WebAssembly than “just the web”.