Performance

AutoCAD & WebAssembly: Moving a 30 Year Code Base to the Web

Your talk is about porting AutoCAD on the desktop to a browser with WebAssembly. How do you plan to go about the talk?

I plan to start my talk with how we arrived at our current technology stack (which is Emscripten and  WebAssembly Binaryen) by talking about our journey from trying flash, JavaScript, asm.js, and, finally, getting to WebAssembly. After that, I would like to highlight some of the peculiarities of the large and constantly changing AutoCAD codebase that we had to deal with as well.

Can you give me some example of some of the challenges with the different paradigms when dealing with the web vs desktop?

For example, you have synchronous vs asynchronous programming issues on the web. How you handle a blocking call on your desktop code base is very different than on the web. Another is shared memory between threads. Synchronous writes is supported on the desktop because you have shared memory that allows you to share data but you don’t have that on the web. There are also things like performance hits due to underlying memory accessors and lack of support for exceptions.