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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Impressive, but I don't see any way to do constraints or sketches.

(I'm also a bit sad that this is a web app, but, alas, such is progress.)

As someone who works in a school with Chromebooks, I love that web apps like this exist, especially if students will be able to export the files to a 3D printer. It greatly opens up the number of tools we can use to do fun things.

That said, also as a teacher and a parent, I worry that Chromebooks are making kids have no idea about the world of non-web-apps. (And file systems, etc. etc.)

I watch my kid create a poster: find an image online, copy & paste into an automatic background remover, c&p into an image editing program to remove the watermark, c&p into Canva for assembling with text etc.

Meanwhile I show her that I can do the whole thing on Pixelmator Pro (or Affinity or Photoshop) and she looks at me like I have three heads.

Chromebooks need to die, we need to get back to native apps. Look with Windows we have msix, with Linux we have flatpack, etc .. Storage is cheap, and our devices are powerful. Let's use that power

It simplifies things for schools, because everything is easily managed, everything integrates with Google classroom, and the hardware is fungible, you can log into any one and have your files.

It doesn't train them how to use real computers, but that's not on the state standards so they don't care.

> It doesn't train them how to use real computers, but that's not on the state standards so they don't care.

Arguably, it really should be.

Google Classroom is the worst LMS I've ever used and the "log in from any machine and have your files" thing was solved by Active Directory decades ago...

The reasons schools ate them up os because they're cheap and were the most readily available laptops during a shortage. I really doubt much else was on anyone's mind.

I also have a few qualms with it:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

For some users, they're perfect (not all - schools etc need Win/Linux/Mac). I have family members who should just have a Chromebook as all they do is browse the internet - copy and paste is a stretch for them!

For CAD you can run Solvespace on a chromebook. I'm not sure I want to promote it for use below high school, as the geometry failures and their workarounds are probably too icky for younger users. I want more polish for kids.

Solvespace is hardly polished enough for general use, though. I can use it, but I constantly struggle against the way it handles sketches.

I think a set of problems where you intentionally create failures and then work through solving them would be quite interesting for anyone learning geometry, beyond a certain point. Understanding exactly why the failures are failures, what about the geometry or the computation makes them fail, would help build an intuition for geometry and topology itself.

Let the kids make websites?!

I love web based software (minus the logins). This saves soooo much time in a teaching environment. Time that can me used for teaching ideas, approaches, rather than struggling with compatibility issues.

The current version does not include this, but it will be available as parametric components in the future.

OFC this being HN people are jumping on the side comment about web apps.

BUT the more relevant and valuable point you made was about constraints and sketches.

And, related to this, true parametric design, which IMO is vital for a CAD package to be taken seriously.

Yep! Would love to try this once he or she adds parametric. We need good-quality reasonably-priced software in this domain.

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.

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.

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.

Or just write it in java

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

If you want performance, you actually wouldn't want it to be exactly the same, ironically. You'd want to include hardware specific optimizations where needed. And unless Java has changed dramatically, this would at least require implementing the core performance critical parts in another compiled language.

Well, yes. I totally agree with you on that one!

The original comment was about (mis)using the browser as some kind of platform independent runtime environment for apps.

Admittedly, at my workplace, I created a few (very simple) html/javascript based apps to get some tasks done quickly (like sorting some tables, or a little task planer tool) as it is convenient, because a browser is something you have everywhere.

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?

Browsers do offer a file system now, too.

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.

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.

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

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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