[vtk-developers] VTK/VES and emscripten?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 9:16 PM, Steve Pieper <pieper at ibility.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks -
>
> Has anyone tried VES/VTK and emscripten[1]?  Other OpenGL (ES) game platforms appear to compile to javascript and work with WebGL (even on a phone!) and you can even run complete, if simple, Qt applications in a browser.
>
> I can already hear the purists scream about this being an 'ugly hack' which, I have to admit, it kind of is.  But it also shows some promise and for a certain subset of VTK functionality it might make sense to expose javascript bindings this way rather than rewriting something new in pure javascript.  See for example the zlib, python, sqlite, and other large C/C++ code bases that are automagically available now in the browser.
>
I haven't had time to actually try it out yet, but have been thinking
about using it (and had some brief discussions with a friend at
Mozilla. I think it would be a great approach that could allow us to
share a lot of common code on mobile and web, although WebGL lacks
some features that are available on mobile as far as I can tell there
is a lot of commonality.

It is certainly something we should consider, and it seems like a good
candidate for the new rendering code in VTK too.

Marcus