Hello World

Being more of the introverted type of tinkerer, the stuff that I build in my free time is never published anywhere. And while I’ve dabbled with web tech in the past, I never grew really fond of it, spending most of my time with C++ / OpenGL style development. This changed with the introduction of WebGL. I always liked writing shaders and other GPGPU stuff, and seeing those things become a part of the web was intriguing. Things like ShaderToy were and are great fun, so I started to play around with that.

It is impressive what people build with HTML / JavaScript these days, but even with the modern web frameworks that are popular today (and made web development much more mature), it never really became my cup of tea. It wasn’t until I discovered the more low-level attempts via Emscripten and asm.js (and its quasi successor WebAssembly). Emscripten makes it possible to bring traditional C++ / OpenGL applications to the web, and by targeting WebGL and WebAssembly the performance is actually quite impressive. Unsurprisingly, this is when I decided that I needed to take a closer look at this, and that my next small application is going to try to target the web platform as well, and if it is even slightly useable, I will publish it somewhere. Hexmap is this first experiment, and I like how it turned out, so I will explore this tech stack further.