Pure Rust IFC/BIM Viewer in the Browser via WebAssembly

Name: Pure Rust IFC/BIM Viewer in the Browser via WebAssembly
Availability: InStock
Author: holg

by holg·Mar 2, 2026·2 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryZero to OneBold Bet

Pure Rust WASM viewer beats C++ incumbents—photometric lighting from IFC geometry is genuinely novel.

Strengths

•Entire stack in Rust (Leptos UI, Bevy 3D, WASM) with no C++ geometry engine or JS runtime.
•Photometric lighting rendering with EULUMDAT data from IFC—real architecture problem, not bolted-on.
•Single 5.8MB Brotli binary demonstrates serious optimization and architectural coherence.

Weaknesses

•BIM viewer ecosystem (Solibri, Tekla, Revit viewers) is entrenched; niche adoption risk.
•No mention of IFC schema coverage, performance on large models, or collaborative features.

Post Description

I built an IFC building model viewer entirely in Rust — Leptos for the UI, Bevy for 3D rendering (WebGPU/WebGL2), parser. It compiles to a single WASM binary (~5.8MB Brotli), no C++ geometry kernel or JS runtime involved.

The demo loads the BayArena stadium with 324 floodlights carrying real EULUMDAT photometric data embedded in the IFC file.

Click any fixture to see its polar light distribution, beam angles, and color temperature. Press L to toggle photometric lighting mode it spawns actual light sources derived from the fixture data. Source at https://github.com/holg/bimifc