Today I revisited CasADi to see if I could use emscripten to compile it to a WebAssembly and run it inside of a Web browser. CasADi is an awesome tool for performing symbolic computation and automatic differentiation, among other things. It also provides interfaces to popular open-source solvers, such as the MINLP solver BONMIN.
I had previously used CasADi during my PhD to implement a grey-box algorithmic framework that I had designed and aptly named GreyOpt (paper, slides). I also used CasADi for implementing the main backend of Unity DGMS, an open-source JSONiq analytics engine. I thought it would be interesting to see if at least some functionality could be easily ported to run directly in the browser.
It was fairly easy to add a new executable target in CMAKE, along with a simple C API that wrapped some functions for constructing symbolic variables and for performing basic symbolic arithmetic. I initially got some compilation errors stemming from an issue with some preprocessor directives that conditionally enabled the pack and unpack methods for unsigned int& arguments based on the value of SIZE_MAX (WASM support is currently only 32-bit).
After resolving those errors, the build and linking of the CasADi WebAssembly completed successfully. Now I can use CasADi to do computer algebra in Chromium ;-)