Help us port to Emscripten

[thadk]

Hello! I am from the https://github.com/codeforboston/windfall-elimination/ project and https://ssacalculator.org . We reached out last year and have made a ton of progress, partnered with Massachusetts Retirees, and even presented the work in front of Congress. Thank you for helping us with the Mac AnyPIA which made it much easier to understand and replicate some of its basic functionality since most of us have macOS development machines.

In order to support retirees that are more than 2 years from retirement, the calculations get a bit too complicated to do well in Javascript on our own. We spent a few weeks reading the source code and we have a basic understanding of the objects and types used to represent the law changes, etc. We have one C++ expert on our team but his availability is not as much as the Javascript developers.

Since anypiamac can no longer works on Catalina, we were wondering if you might want to join us and help us get the AnyPIA building in emscripten so we can use it as a new backend for our ssacalculator.org user experience.
We have user tested it with retirees at town halls in Massachusetts with the congressman partner and think it is a significant improvement over the old calculators.

Ideally it could be adopted somewhat more officially, however that cannot be a reality without the policy details and updates in this codebase.

[mrpippy]

That’s a cool idea, I’d be happy to look into it. The Windows source code is probably a better starting point for an Emscripten port, since it uses a much newer Boost which I think already has some Emscripten support. (Also, likely better tested and includes a command-line app which would help with testing). I’ll make a repo and start toying with it

[thadk]

Thanks much @mrpippy, welcome to create the repo, or we can use one within the codeforboston org like this one: the JS devs are new to emscripten.

We have a basic Windows repo here too that we were using to sort through that code if it is helpful. I've asked my collaborator @alexjcode to add you. In terms of synchronous work, we typically meet on Tuesdays after 7pm EST and here's our Slack–#WindfallAwareness. Happy to just correspond on here too.

Good to hear about Boost: we didn't realize that.

I also put the doc's up for easy linking:

• HTML: http://thadk.net/anypiamac-docs/html/
• PIA files: http://thadk.net/anypiamac-docs/
• Repo: https://github.com/thadk/anypiamac-docs

[mrpippy]

Great, I think it makes sense to use codeforboston/anypia-js, I can add the last few versions of the Windows code. Also, does that account have Travis CI (or similar) set up? It would be nice to be able to run the Windows builds.

[thadk]

Thanks! I enabled Travis-CI for it. I had never considered using it to do Windows builds. Let us know how we can help or jump in. I got emscripten installed locally but don't have a Windows VM handy quite yet.