Quick start

Install the dependency

To use the runtime, you need to add the com.dylibso.chicory:runtime dependency to your dependency management system.

Maven

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.dylibso.chicory</groupId>
  <artifactId>runtime</artifactId>
  <version>latest-release</version>
</dependency>

Gradle

implementation 'com.dylibso.chicory:runtime:latest-release'

Loading and Instantiating Wasm Modules

First your Wasm module must be loaded from disk and then instantiated. Let's download a test module . This module contains some code to compute factorial:

Download from the link or with curl:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dylibso/chicory/main/wasm-corpus/src/main/resources/compiled/iterfact.wat.wasm > factorial.wasm

Load this module and instantiate it:

import com.dylibso.chicory.runtime.ExportFunction;
import com.dylibso.chicory.wasm.types.Value;
import com.dylibso.chicory.wasm.Parser;
import com.dylibso.chicory.runtime.Instance;
import java.io.File;

// point this to your path on disk
var module = Parser.parse(new File("./factorial.wasm"));
Instance instance = Instance.builder(module).build();

You can think of the module as of inert code, and the instance is the run-time representation of that code: a virtual machine ready to execute.

Invoking a Wasm Function

Wasm modules, like all code modules, can export functions to the outside world. This module exports a function called "iterFact". We can get a handle to this function using Instance#export(String):

ExportFunction iterFact = instance.export("iterFact");

iterFact can be invoked with the apply() method. We must map any Java types to raw longs and do the reverse when we want to go back to Java.

var result = iterFact.apply(5)[0];
System.out.println("Result: " + result); // should print 120 (5!)

Note: Functions in Wasm can return multiple values, hence the array. This function only returns one value, so we take the first value.