[genericpseudo]

Me of fifteen years ago would love this for lab classes on, e.g., classical molecular dynamics.

The computational load of these simulations is, in modern terms, not large, so Emscripten-compiled simulations would be plenty fast enough, and deployment of web pages in a computer-lab environment (or for people working from their dorms!) is way easier than the alternatives.

So there are real, non-trivial applications. You wouldn't want to be running ABINIT or whatever in your web browser, but GROMACS on some small system? Not unreasonable.

[infinite8s]

For classroom study - wouldn't straight javascript suffice for basic classical molecular dynamics? That approach would also make it much easier for students to play around with different update algorithms, temperature control, etc.

[genericpseudo]

That would involve

a) writing yourself an engine and that's actual work

b) that engine not being one which is used in real research

So "it depends" – for introductory teaching yes, for training researchers less so.

[goatlover]

Teachers can utilize Jupyter notebooks today.

[luthaf]

Yep, I will definitively try to compile my Rust MD code to emscripten and give it a look! There are quite a few JS molecules visualizers, so the outcome can be pretty nice for teaching.