In a world of CAD packages with obscure or unfriendly interfaces, there is a player that stands out and is remarkable because it has no interface. OpenSCAD is a CAD package for coders, in which all design elements are created in a scripting language rather than graphically. It might not be for everyone, but it has a massive following and its reach has been extended as you can now run it from a modern web browser.

The origins of this project date back to August 2021, when when Autodrop3D’s [mmiscool] offered a considerable bounty to anyone wishing to port the parametric CAD modeler to web assembly. Developer [Dominick Schroer] finally answered the call with openscad-wasm, which implements the core of OpenSCAD as an ES6 JavaScript module. From there, all you had to do was pair it with a UI, and off you went to the cloud.

Opening it up and trying it out, we found it to be a very usable OpenSCAD version, although a bit slower to render than the desktop equivalent on a mediocre laptop. We haven’t tried exporting and printing an STL, but so far that’s given us no reason to believe it won’t be as useful as the version you’re used to.

But wait, there’s more! Along with this effort, [Olivier Chafik] also worked on his own idea of ​​what OpenSCAD should be on the web. It uses the same kernel developed by [Dominick], but combined it with Microsoft’s Monaco editor and a Javascript STL viewer. Although they are very similar, we are happy to report that there is no rivalry here; in fact, according to the video after the break, it looks like two projects have already swapped some code.

The movement from desktop apps to the browser and often to a paid cloud has seemed relentless in recent years, so it’s nice to see a rare example of open source browser migration. This has the practical effect of bringing the CAD package to platforms like tablets or Chromebooks that wouldn’t normally be an OpenSCAD platform, and we like that very much.