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room505

CAD and BIM

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Exactly what I came to say.

As someone who has used Autocad since Ver 9 (1993) this is important.

Also - heavy 3D design. Blender/Alias/whatever these days.

Solidworks as well.

The new Autocad web app is pretty impressive. Feels native even with large CAD files: https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad-web-app/overview

OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/) have been doing CAD in a browser for a while.

webgl and wasm?

Edit: I presumed that the context of the discussion was apps in a general sense. Obviously not every application is going to be on the web and there are a lot of niche software that will never make the switch. I was thinking more qucad or sketch 3d for woodworkers to plan their desks, not solidworks and all its plugins to handle complex fluid simulation in mission critical areas.

Still wishful thinking at this point.

Do you know OnShape?

I worked in the EDA space for a while and even built an online circuit simulation tool [0] while there. I'm aware of couple of startups such as [1] that tried to move these tools to the browser. There are a number of challenges that make web apps difficult in this space such as"

1. Pricing model: For the simulation side of EDA, you need a lot of computing power. With desktop apps, the user already has a powerful machine available that you don't have to pay to use. With the cloud, you need to pay for all the machines so finding a pricing model that works is a challenge.

2. User expectations: The users who are willing to pay > $100k/seat/year expect very advanced features that would probably take 10s or 100s of engineering years to get working. These users also don't care as much about the UI/UX problems that a modern app would solve.

References

0. https://www.multisim.com/

1. https://upverter.com/

We've had some success with 2D AutoCAD on WASM, but it's not as easy as just recompiling when you are dealing with a nearly 40 year old codebase and care about pixel level accuracy. Also, it will never be as responsive as native, mouse events lag on the browser even if you are doing nothing else. AutoCAD users care a lot about such lag.

The BIM stuff (i.e. Revit) is very Windows-specific so a straight port with WASM is a no-starter.

The actual 3D rendering with WebGL is the least problem, we have that nearly solved (in terms of performance relative to desktop -- we never really needed 60fps anyway). The problem there comes in when you have a huge design that does not fit in the allocated/allowed heap space.

(throwaway for obvious reasons)

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