The State of Zero-Dependency Wasm: A 2026 Update from wazero and Chicory

Edoardo Vacchi - Red Hat / Andrea Peruffo - IBM

Join the wazero and Chicory maintainers for a 2026 status update. We’ll dive into Wasm 3.0, new performance benchmarks, and real-world use cases like AI agents and Maven/Go distribution. Come hear what worked, what’s still hard, and where we’re going next

If you have been around the Wasm community for a while, you might have heard of wazero, the zero-dependency, pure-Go Wasm runtime, and Chicory, the zero-dependency, pure-Java Wasm runtime.

Wasm I/O has been the stage for many of wazero’s and Chicory’s biggest milestones: we were there for wazero 1.0, we were there to unveil wazero’s compiler overhaul, we were there to introduce Chicory to the world and the challenges with making it enterprise-ready.

Join us for a tour of the latest news of your favorite language-native, zero-dependency Wasm runtimes! In this talk, we will dive into the technical reality of the last year: what worked, what’s still hard, and where we’re going next. We will explore how wazero (no CGO) and Chicory (no JNI) are evolving to meet the demands of a rapidly maturing ecosystem.

In this session, we will discuss:

Our plans for Wasm 3.0 and other spec proposals. Our recent performance improvements with some numbers to back us up. The new, unexpected use cases emerging in 2025-2026, including polyglot AI agents, “in-core” data processing, and distributing portable libraries via standard package managers (Maven/Go Modules). Finally, we will discuss the challenges ahead and how our respective communities plan to deal with them. Come see how we’re navigating the complexities of the 3.0 era to ensure your WebAssembly future remains high-performance and zero-dependency!