CheerpJ 4.1: Java in the browser, now supporting Java 17 (preview)

Summary

Around a month ago we announced CheerpJ 4.0, the first release of our WebAssembly-based JVM with support for multiple versions of Java. The release of CheerpJ 4.0 was focused on getting the infrastructure right, maintaining our long standing Java 8 support while introducing Java 11, and allowing further versions of Java to be supported. As stated in our roadmap, our plan was to introduce Java 17 support only later in the year. Thanks to faster than expected progress, we are now releasing this feature today, much earlier than we expected, as part of CheerpJ 4.1. This is intended to be a preview of the stable support that is still scheduled for a future CheerpJ 5.0 release, expected before the end of 2025. Moreover, the initial support for Java 11 in the previous release received extensive testing by the developer community on a big variety of applications and libraries. Thanks to the help of our users, several critical bugs in the original release were found and fixed. This new 4.1 release also serves as an opportunity to bring much more stability to Java 11 support. What is new? RuneLite running in the browser via CheerpJ in Java 11 mode Although not long has passed since the previous release, there are already many improvements in CheerpJ, across different subsystems. CheerpJ 4.1 introduces: Support for SSL and Audio in Java 11 Performance optimizations Improved networking stack Improvements to mobile usability, for both Swing and AWT Preview of Java 17 support Feedback and testing from the community have been invaluable to help us improve the stability of CheerpJ. We expect that Java 17 will attract even more attention, resulting in a positive feedback loop that will bring CheerpJ ever closer to our vision of running modern Java in the browser. What can CheerpJ do? CheerpJ is a full WebAssembly-based JVM for the browser, and comes with a complete OpenJDK runtime, as well as a powerful emulation layer to provide file system access, general networking support and ot...