cq-containers VS opencascade-emscripten-p

Slightly OT:

So after reading this, I went and tried cadquery ... it's really nice, but it is very, very unfortunately tied at the hip with anaconda, which is a monstrosity.

I'm not sure why they would tie such a ball and chain to an otherwise super nice CAD scripting tool.

There is luckily a docker based solution [1] that cleanly lets you wrap and try the whole cancerous thing without it spilling all over your system.

[1] https://github.com/RubenRubens/cq-containers/tree/master/cq-...

There is an OpenCascade version compiled down to wasm [1] that we're currently using embedded in our own app. Rendering to WebGL is relatively straight-forward and the system as a whole works well. Gives me a lot of power when designing mechanical systems and running simulations on the resulting models. Perf of the CAD kernel on the web is not great, but 'just good enough'.

Troubleshooting issues is tricky though. If something doesn't work debugging is nearly impossible and the (C++) docs are very challenging.

OpenCascade is very powerful, but the ergonomics of the API aren't great. Writing a simple FP-style immutable wrapper around it has proven very fruitful and we can now describe relatively complicated models with a bare minimum of TypeScript code. Lot's of fun!

[1] https://github.com/gabrielcuvillier/opencascade-emscripten-p...