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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it would be plausible to use this with webgl via WASM... Or if anyone's working on a javascript implementation of the algorithm.

Good text rendering/layout is about the only thing I feel like I'm missing from being able to pretty simply/rapidly create 3d apps with web tech these days. I still end up typically just overlaying DOM elements over the scene :/

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> I wonder if it would be plausible to use this with webgl via WASM.

That's precisely what I'm looking at. I'm not as familiar with the front-end space as I used to be. What's the SOTA these days?

IMO, unless you're writing a new renderer from scratch or doing something else super custom, three.js is the best way of doing real-time 3d for the web these days.

But, here's their article on text in three.js: https://threejs.org/docs/#manual/en/introduction/Creating-te...

I think the bitmap font stuff can be extended to rendering SDF (signed distance field) fonts, which are nice enough for me--but that is not ready to use out of the box.

I would just render text to a canvas and use it as a texture in your Three.js scene. That's how I do it in my side project and it works without any extra dependency.

> webgl and WASM

I just found this...

Google's CanvasKit - Skia + WebAssembly

https://skia.org/user/modules/canvaskit

This might work well with Golem (www.golem.network) because they've implemented WASM which opens up many possibilities. I haven't found a cheaper way to render.

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