I've always found WebAssembly very interesting conceptually but I never really needed to use it - until relatively recently.
I invested quite a bit of time and effort into figuring out how WebAssembly and Emscripten work. I eventually managed to compile the Dear ImGui emscripten example and modified it to suit my requirements. Given my lack of experience with C/C++, I can tell you that this has been far from being a straightforward process. I have eventually realized that someone else out there might benefit from this experience of mine.
As I write these paragraphs, I realise that, despite accomplishing a few small initial goals, there is still lot to do. I hope you find these libraries useful, if anything just to get yourself acquainted with WebAssembly, C/C++ (and soon Rust).
I work on this project during my spare time so the overall quality is ... quite poor. Please bear with me while I make the necessary improvements.
Due of my very limited expertise with C/C++, it is highly likely that the code I wrote so far is buggy and not particularly performant (read, quite crappy).
There are currently no tests. I would like to add coverage for the C/C++ layer ASAP.
Performance-wise, the current implementation of the libraries is far from being production-ready. In general the code can be optimised but I also have a growing suspicion that they could benefit from multi-threading. That said, I have learned that, for example, ImGui cannot take control of an off-screen Canvas instance due to its attempts to resize it. Also, attempts to enable the -sPROXY_TO_PTHREAD emscripten switch proved unsuccessful as ultimately WebGL instructions can be sent only from the main thread. I believe it is possible to leverage multi-threading in an emscripten-compatible way though I have yet to figure that one out.
GUI libraries such as egui are a very good example of accessible non-DOM based GUIs. The overall impression I get is that DOM-based GUIs are more accessible. Perhaps this project will foster interest in the topic and motivate people and/or companies to invest more in this area.
At the moment I am focusing on bindings for React only. The renderer is actually adapted from react-native's Fabric renderer. Perhaps there are other options I could/should have considered. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.
Dear Imgui (work in progress) (very basic online demo) Browser support: latest Chrome and Edge only presently.
- egui (work in progress) (very basic online demo) Browser support: Chrome, Firefox, Edge
Would you like to help add support for a GUI library of your choice? Let's discuss.
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
 genautz 💻 📖 📦 🔧 🚇 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!
