Chicory Redline has been released, bringing native-speed wasm execution to the JVM - without JNI, without native binaries, and without a GraalVM dependency.
Some context for the unfamiliar: Wasm outside the browser is a portable, sandboxed binary format useful for running untrusted or polyglot code safely inside a host application. Plugin systems are the primary use case. The problem for JVM shops has been that mature Wasm runtimes are written in C++ or Rust, meaning JNI and platform-specific native binaries. GraalWasm solves this but requires GraalVM specifically - a real infrastructure constraint.
Chicory's thesis, borrowed from wazero in the Go ecosystem, is that a Wasm runtime should be a plain JAR dependency that runs on any JVM. That's been true for a while. The remaining objection was performance.
Redline addresses that through Cranelift: a production-grade native code compiler written in Rust. Rust compiles to Wasm. Chicory runs Wasm. So: compile Cranelift to a .wasm module, run it through Chicory at build time, use it to emit native machine code, bundle that code as a JAR resource. At runtime, invoke it via Panama FFM (Java 25+) or jffi (Java 11+). They got native code generation without writing a native compiler and without breaking their zero-dependency constraint. If a platform isn't supported, Chicory's bytecode compiler takes over silently.
The benchmarks are grounded in production software: the Prism Ruby parser runs roughly 10x faster under Redline than Chicory's AOT compiler, and that integration is already upstream in JRuby. SQLite comes in around 4x, toml2json around 6.5x. Compute-heavy workloads gain the most; simple integer loops see nothing, because the JVM's JIT was already handling those well.
Redline is 0.0.1 and experimental — the API will change, and newer Wasm proposals like Exception Handling and GC aren't yet supported. But 28,000 spec tests passing and a shipping JRuby integration is a credible foundation. Worth watching, particularly if Panama FFM is on your radar and you've been waiting for a library use case that makes its value concrete.