Building a Java Virtual Machine: How hard could it be?

Part 1 of a series discussing the joys and pitfalls (mostly pitfalls) of hacking together a minimal JVM in Javascript. The live code base — a very rough work in progress! — is on GitHub. Subscribe for further updates! ;-)

This past summer, I had a conversation with a friend about his need to run small Java programs in a web page. It was a pandemic summer and I had some…