PySdfScad VS wasp

> To clarify, can this method be used as a fully functional replacement to BREP for a mechanical (machine design) CAD system?

I think so, but there are some open problems. Also it depends on the senior people. Inigo Quilez is a world class expert in this domain, and for the most part we're copying his work, get him on board and you'll be golden.

Fundamentally it makes sense, BREP is about representing boundaries and you can definitely use SDFs to represent the area under a boundary (infinite SDFs are possible, although obviously you can't turn them in to a mesh). Enclose a volume with boundaries and you can mesh that out just fine. A bit different from CSG-based SDFs, but entirely plausible.

>what approach would you recommend?

If I was to do this I'd take the constraint solver from solvespace (same one used in this post) and start using it to generate SDFs. At that point you're already 80% of the way to your end goal.

I mean if I was personally to do this I'd start by making a system that implements everything openscad can do, try to get some funding going, and than add in a solvespace based workbench for doing 2D cad that you can import into an openscad-ish language. You can see my efforts here: https://github.com/traverseda/PySdfScad

That's tackling it from a different angle than BREP though. I think that openscad but better is a surprisingly viable thing though, especially if you use it to do things like generate the gears/screws/whatever you import into your BREP based CAD project. Use scriptable CAD as the underpinning for more advances CAD.

> How long would you estimate it would take for three full time senior developers to get a useful system out?

Well define "useful"? Honestly I think you can get 80% done in under a month. I built the first pysdfscad in a week or two and replicated 80% of openscad's features. Fogleman built the library I used for pysdfscad in under a month.

I'd expect something pretty good in under a year at that kind of rate. There would be some outstanding problems, like it would be a challenge to figure out how to apply a fillet/chamfer to an edge, but not an insurmountable challenge. Geometry import is another place where you're going to spend a lot of time/money but is very important.

So let's say two or three years with three very competent seniors working on it to get a pretty good CAD program, with a GUI.

Depends on exactly what I'm making, the answer is probably different if I'm making like a chat app or something more data centric.

For something really minimal, an internal tool, I'd probably use grist. Grist is a "no code" spreadsheet program that is open source and works on a relational database. I just threw together an inventory management system for my weekly dnd group in a few minutes, and I've shared it with the group. I find the relational mindset grist uses a lot easier to reason about than traditional spreadsheets.

The next level up would be django with htmx. Very minimal javascript, I might embed a javascript "applet" like a map into it if needed. This covers 99% of data driven apps.

If I wanted to build something like say discord I'd probably use a pretty similar stack for the MVP, but with server-sent-events (htmx with server sent events is nice) and web components for more complicated interactions. That's probably why I'm not in charge for building complicated single page webapps with a lot of interdependent state though. I maintain this approach should work but haven't had a real chance to test it in the wild.

If I'm writing CAD software I'm probably going with QT/python/(numpy/jax/compute-shaders/sympy/etc). Python might not be the fastest, but when you're accelerating it with one of those machine learning libraries it can be really powerful. I've actually been working on something CAD-ish using that stack here: https://github.com/traverseda/PySdfScad

That's probably roughly the same stack I'd use for things like computer vision, machine learning, etc. Ironically anything where performance is important I'd probably choose python over a compiled language.

Mind you the QT python documentation is really not great, for a really minimal MVP I might swap qt out for pyimgui which is amazing for rapid prototyping but is going to be a real pain to do things like syntax highlight a text editor or embed HTML content.

Embedded electronics? Probably micropython on an ESP32 for an MVP. A REPL on your microcontroller is really nice. Robotics I'd probably use buildroot to build a custom linux distro.

I don't have much experience with mobile development, so I'd probably end up using QT with python and pyqtdeploy, but that's not an approach I'd recommend anyone else follow. I'm keeping an eye on Tauri in that space, although I really wish they made it easier to bundle in things that aren't single page javascript web apps (like a python application).

So yeah, mostly I'd use python. Master of some trades, jack of a bunch of others, it's flexible and powerful enough that I feel happy to have specialized in it, even if deploying apps to end users can be finicky and annoying. I'd avoid the javascript ecosystem as much as possible, and where I'd have to use javascript I'd prefer to make self-contained web components.

Another example of a React framework utilizing Vite to give their users a SPA experience is Wasp - a full-stack framework for React & Node.js that drastically cuts the boilerplate. Despite being a full-stack framework, it focuses on the standardized approach of deploying a client-side React app with a Node.js server to be as portable as possible. With this approach, you can deploy your app pretty much anywhere, as well as self-host it, which is also a thing that we mentioned before in this article.

As before, you will be redirected to the application's login page. Click to link to sign up to create a new account. After authenticating, you will be able to access the todo list functionality as before. ## Conclusion In this guide, we demonstrated how to build and deploy a Wasp application to Koyeb. We started with one of Wasp's templates to create a working, full-stack web application backed by a database. We migrated the application's configuration from a local SQLite database to an external PostgreSQL database to prepare for deployment. Afterwards, we created a multi-stage `Dockerfile` to build and configure our various application layers. Finally, we deployed the backend and web app to Koyeb by targeting different stages in the `Dockerfile`. This tutorial covers the basics of how to manage a Wasp project and deploy to a production environment. As you continue to develop your projects, be sure to check out the [Wasp documentation](https://wasp-lang.dev/docs) to learn how to integrate new features, work with the data model, and leverage the development framework to make your life easier.

First off, Wasp is a full-stack React, NodeJS, and Prisma framework with superpowers. It just crossed 10,000 stars on GitHub, and it has been used to create over 50,000 projects.

When building AI Blog Articles, I decided to get started as fast as possible. So I looked for a free boilerplate and stumbled upon Open SaaS, which used YC-backed Wasp. It is a full-stack React + NodeJS + Prisma that takes 8 hours to get started with.

Exactly. Wasp, https://wasp-lang.dev, is the only framework in the React/Node/Prisma space that's taking this opinionated approach to full-stack development.

For example, you get full-stack auth by just adding this to your config file:

`auth.methods: { email: {}, google: {} }`

Then you on-the-fly Auth UI components and all the necessary hooks

If you already have some sort of foundation in programming, use AI and some great abstractions/frameworks to get things done even faster. For example, instead of creating everything from the ground up (and probably suffering on little things along the way) you can skip repeating yourself a ton of times by using Wasp, which is a great React/Node full-stack framework that takes care of managing the boilerplate side of programming for you. 🤯

Aider is one of my favorite AI agents, especially because it can work with existing codebases. We've seen a lot of good results from folks who used it with Wasp (https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp) - a full-stack web framework I'm working on.

A "marketingy" demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXunbNBpgZg&ab_channel=Wasp

Thanks for reading! Find more about Wasp and support us on our journey to reaching 10,000 stars here.

For those who want the tool to have full control over their stack simply and easily, look no further! Wasp is an opinionated full-stack framework that leverages its compiler for a fast and easy way to create a database, backend, and frontend for your app. It uses React, Node.js, and Prisma, which are some of the most well-known tools that full-stack web developers are using.