A Go CEL Policy Engine in Java, with Quarkus Chicory

Quarkus Chicory is a new Quarkus extension that brings the Chicory WebAssembly runtime to Java applications. This post demonstrates a practical use case: running Google's CEL-Go library (used by Kubernetes operators for policy validation) inside a Java/Quarkus app via WebAssembly, without reimplementing CEL in Java. The Go CEL code is compiled to WASM using the WASI target, and Quarkus Chicory generates Java bytecode from the WASM module at build time. The integration involves annotating a Java class with @WasmModuleInterface, which triggers code generation of a typed Java wrapper around the exported Go functions. The result is a Kubernetes-style CEL policy engine running entirely on the JVM, with live reload, native image support, and clean dependency injection via the WasmQuarkusContext API.