We will absolutely be supporting KiCad! Placement is something we have big plans for but I think it’s important to have a really fast, cache-friendly autorouter as a foundation (if you are cache friendly, moving components and trying different layouts is much much faster)
Javascript is fairly portable now with many runtimes (some even quite small such as QuickJS or Proffor), so I anticipate people will be able to run locally and build their own ginormous cache :)
I think everyone should be concerned about lockin and fragmenting ecosystems in EDA, but tscircuit and our autorouter are MIT-permissive technology (very rare in EDA) so we play nice (interoperable) with everyone.
I wonder why there's no standard API for autorouting so that a particular EDA must be supported. I'd love to see autorouter as a standardized HTTP endpoint so that I can run one locally or even buy Autorouter-As-A-Service.
E.g. I'd happily pay for TopoR¹ as a service for some projects while others are fine with classic rouing.
Software innovation in EDA seems pretty slow and is more IP-sensitive, so there hasn't been a huge proliferation of cloud services. We're trying to bring some up some standards that make EDA more web-friendly, like the Circuit JSON[1] format and the Simple Route JSON format[2], but it'll still be years before the tools support web-first standards (kind of reminds me of png vs webp)
How are you planning to support kicad? Would it be using kicad's new IPC API? In principle it should be possible to create javascript bindings for the new protobuf interface.
We are looking hard at the IPC interface or doing a plugin, but we will also support “uploading” kicad_sch/kicad_pcb to a browser (local-first, so not actually uploading)
Javascript is fairly portable now with many runtimes (some even quite small such as QuickJS or Proffor), so I anticipate people will be able to run locally and build their own ginormous cache :)
I think everyone should be concerned about lockin and fragmenting ecosystems in EDA, but tscircuit and our autorouter are MIT-permissive technology (very rare in EDA) so we play nice (interoperable) with everyone.