Developer Working on Browser Port of KiCad EDA Software Using WebAssembly
By
david927
A baker's-dozen of insight crammed into one ring.
Summary
A developer is working on porting KiCad, an open-source electronics design automation software, to run in web browsers using WebAssembly. The project involves significant challenges with multithreading, debugging race conditions, and adapting the WxWidgets framework for browser compatibility. The developer has made progress with about 200 tests passing and a working browser build, but continues to face technical hurdles with Web Workers and asyncify transitions.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledI'm working on porting KiCad to the browser. It's a lot of sweat and tears, multithreading issues and some more sweat.
I've updated a port of WxWidgets and now I support all the features KiCad needs with ~200 tests.
Right now I have a build that loads in the browser, but I really want to have 'multithreading' which means workers in the web.
One can use asyncify with emscripten to translate blocking C++ to WASM, but that transition is not perfect, right now I'm debugging a bug where there's a race condition that halts all execution and the main thread runs in an infinite loop.
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