Enter . Part 3: What is WASM GC? WebAssembly (WASM) is a low-level assembly-like language that runs in the browser at near-native speed. However, originally, WASM only understood linear memory (a big array of bytes). It didn't understand "objects" or "references."
It represents the moment when the most popular Java game of all time finally shed its runtime dependencies. No more Java Runtime Environment. No more OpenGL drivers. Just a URL, a modern browser, and a garbage collector that finally understands what Minecraft needs.
The magic ingredient was , a transpiler that converts Java bytecode into JavaScript. For older versions of Minecraft, this worked reasonably well. The codebase was smaller, the rendering engine was simpler, and the memory footprints were manageable.
