Comment by joeevans1000

Comment by joeevans1000 7 days ago

12 replies

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Browsers can be just as powerful as 'native' apps. This is an example of that. Browser apps free the user from proprietary operating systems and their companies. Of course, Linux is a way around that. However, why not just write it once and let students and engineers the world over be able to share and open files easily?

UPDATE: On my newer laptop thius is faster than my native apps. And I was literally drawing shapes within 30 seconds of clicking on the link to this app. Compare that to the nightmare of all the other tools out there with registrations, email clutter, 2FA, and on and on. Oh, and cost in most cases!

UPDATE 2: I have no connection to this team other than having just seen a post online about this tool. I've been navigating the world of SketchUp/AutoCad/Revit recently so this of course is totally thrilling. Especially for what it means for the future.

gmueckl 7 days ago

This is just blatantly wrong. There are so many native resources that any serious 3D application requires access to that are blocked by browsers that this statement just isn't true and never will be.

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  • abe_m 7 days ago

    Out of curiosity, what native resources are needed? It seems Solidworks mainly needs access to the file system, GPU, and perhaps networking. GPU and networking in the browser, and the file handling could be implemented over the network instead of locally.

    For most current pro CAD, certainly there are a lot of calls to Win32 libraries on Windows, but those aren't fundamentally needed by a CAD system. There was professional 3D CAD before Windows.

    I don't know what native hardware would be needed that isn't already accessible through current Chrome?

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    • gmueckl 6 days ago

      There is the full power of CUDA kernels, for starters. Then there's a lot of potential low level optimizations that browsers don't enable that can easily make a 2x to 10x performance difference. Also, there is no good way to give hard bounds on memory usage.

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      • ath92 6 days ago

        CUDA kernels are a non starter because they require Nvidia GPUs. Things like CAD software will mostly use some kind of lower common denominator graphics layer like openGL. Webgpu is actually a decent alternative to that.

        There certainly are optimisations that aren’t possible in web browsers today. Arbitrary wasm memory constraints and difficulties around cpu multithreading or simd for example. But CUDA kernels aren’t a realistic option for most cad software.

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        • gmueckl 6 days ago

          Ansys runs on CUDA. That the reality of your "non-starter".

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      • abe_m 5 days ago

        I think the use of CUDA is niche in the CAD world, probably constrained to a sub-set of FEA. We dropped 6 figures on an Abaqus system -> new hardware, new software within the last couple of years, and a lot of the analysis still runs on the CPU, with a bit of off load to the GPU.

        On the performance end, the is a wide range of CAD that was done on systems more than 10x slower, so that also may not be a deal-breaker. For the simpler end of professional CAD operation, I haven't noticed any performance gain from a 2nd get Core i7 to a 10th gen. On the high-complexity end, there is some benefit for some operations, but certainly there is a wide scope of application that could be fine with only 10% of peak performance on newer work stations.

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  • joeevans1000 7 days ago

    That's why I said 'can'. Once OS's lift restrictions on what browsers can access then we'll finally have something more close to 'write once run everywhere'. But that wouldn't really help the proprietary software systems and companies.

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    • capyba 6 days ago

      Or just write it in java

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      • SunlitCat 6 days ago

        Was about to say "If we only have some kind of runtime system, which could run an app exactly the same on every supported operating system without needing to port that app, that would be awesome!". :D

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