OpenROAD: web gui vs Qt

[titan73]

I noticed the development of the web gui. The parity with Qt gui is dealt in #10619. So I have some questions:
- What was the intention behind this shift to a web gui?
- What are the advantages of a web gui overt Qt?
- Are the speed the same as Qt?
TIA

[maliberty]

Qt has been a regular stumbling point for building from source. The X11 dependencies don't play well with Bazel caching. The browser handles all GL acceleration dependencies and removes them from OR. Qt has minimal test tools that are OSS so gui has no automated testing. AI are very good at web development. You can use it across a network to a remote server (though it should in a trusted environment, not internet facing).

The speed is comparable to better as it uses threading and caching. Single threaded it is a bit worse but that isn't a case we are optimizing for.

The goal is for web to replace gui over time.

[titan73]

Ok thanks for the explanation. How can it be enabled at build?

[maliberty]

It is by default.

[titan73]

The web gui is by default? I would have thought it's Qt.

[maliberty]

Qt is a lot of extra dependencies where web is much simpler (mostly Boost). At runtime it is up the user to choose.

[titan73]

Sorry I don't understand. Web & Qt gui are both compiled in and the gui type is selected when openroad binary is launched? If so, what is the option to select one from another? If web is the default so what is the option for qt?

[maliberty]

openroad starts the CLI
openroad -gui starts the GUI
openroad -web starts the web interface

[maliberty]

There are also TCL commands to do the same.

[titan73]

Ah ok got it thanks.

[titan73]

It seems there is no viewer embedded in OR. I had to use firefox for viewing the gui. Is that intended? Will a viewer be integrated at some point?
When tested with firefox, the gui rendering view was very slow. No very usable here.

[titan73]

I'll take a look but I'm not used to web gui. Do you have some hints?

[maliberty]

Just asked Claude

[titan73]

Thanks for the code.
I compared both versions side by side with 1 cpu. The patch makes it less blurry (similar to the Qt gui), faster and less glitchy.
With 1 cpu, the rendering time (mousewheel change to stable image) is 2s-3s before and 1s-2s after.
I prefer with the patch so it would be nice to have an option. If there is nothing planned for this, I can do a PR.

[titan73]

Btw, is there a way measure rendering time though an debug option?

[titan73]

Here is so tested I did between gui & web (w/o the patch):

cpu   time gui (s)  time web (s)  
1     0.5-1         2-3
2     0.5-1         2-2.5
4     0.5-1         0.5-2

[maliberty]

You can pick up artifacts from the CI, e.g. https://jenkins.openroad.tools/job/OpenROAD-flow-scripts-Nightly-Public/7474/artifact/

[titan73]

Nice thanks.