Can we show Julia apps written with ImGui.jl in a browser?

[sairus7]

There are several example apps in C++ that can be opened from browser:

Emscripten port of ImGui:
https://github.com/pthom/hello_imgui
https://pthom.github.io/hello_imgui/book/build.html#emscripten-instructions

Streaming DrawData structure over WebSockets:
https://github.com/ggerganov/imgui-ws

[JamesWrigley]

I think there are two compilation options (neither of which is officially support AFAIK):

1. Porting julia to WASM such that it can compile code/run the GC etc, basically what pyodide is doing.
2. juliac gains the ability to compile Julia programs to WASM, which I'd guess is less work than porting julia. I haven't tried it but I'm confident that we could make CImGui statically compilable since it's mostly just ccall's.

Either way, we'd also need to compile CImGuiPack_jll to WASM. Which is probably doable, but I've no idea how to do it :P

[sairus7]

I think it would be simpler to try a websocket approach, since it is just working with ImGui::GetDrawData():
https://github.com/ggerganov/imgui-ws/blob/master/examples/basic-null/main.cpp#L70

[JamesWrigley]

Oh I think I see what you mean, send the drawdata over a websocket by wrapping imgui-ws? Yeah that would probably work. And the imgui-ws API looks really small so it's probably easy to write a C header for it.