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.
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.
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.
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.