FreeCAD in the Browser
A developer has successfully ported the complex FreeCAD desktop application to run directly in a web browser using WebAssembly and JSPI. The project serves as a stress test for AI-assisted coding tools, with the entire implementation process documented in a public archive.
It started with a Hacker News thread : LibreCAD, the whole Qt desktop application, compiled to WebAssembly and running in a tab. magik shipped that, then OpenSCAD, and the pattern looked like a recipe - Qt for WebAssembly, JSPI, a static dependency stack, and an honest audit of whatever the app assumed about threads, filesystems and OpenGL. The obvious next question was how far it scales. So here is FreeCAD : parametric 3D CAD, sketch-constrained solid modeling, an embedded Python, a dozen-plus workbenches. It is roughly an order of magnitude larger than the other two - about 1.5 million lines of C++ and 700 thousand of Python - and it now runs in a browser tab.
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