libfive VS cxx

No; Bauble doesn't know how to "rasterize" SDFs into meshes; it only knows how to raymarch them. It's theoretically possible, but it's a pretty complex problem that would take me much too long to figure out and implement. So Bauble is relegated to just making pretty pictures for now. If you want to produce meshes using SDFs, check out https://libfive.com/

This is a mid-point in Matt Keeter's research.

Start at:

http://mattkeeter.com/research/thesis.pdf

then see:

http://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/kokopelli/

then Antimony (see the article at: http://hackaday.com/2015/05/29/otherworldy-cad-software-hail... ), then the current effort:

https://github.com/libfive/libfive

(and also see: https://www.gitlab.com/kavalogic-inc/tovero "a binding of Libfive to Common Lisp, including a standalone REPL-based viewer"[https://github.com/Irev-Dev/curated-code-cad] can be integrated with https://www.gitlab.com/kavalogic-inc/clive

Currently I'm using OpenSCAD (w/ BlockSCAD as a front-end: https://www.blockscad3d.com because I prefer a sort of visual representation), but have been stymied by the lack of file I/O (I want to write out G-code).

Still looking for a 3D modeling tool which is:

- a node or block editor

From another random git commit I found it it seems the project moved to being hosted on gitlab.com under the account name "kavalogic-inc" but all the repos got deleted: - https://gitlab.com/kavalogic-inc

A recent question on AutoCAD lisp pointed to the libfive C++ library with C bindings. It's GitHub page points to the Tovero 3D Modeling system (link on Gitlab). That project is not found on Gitlab.

Or https://libfive.com/, which is less clunky (but no longer OpenSCAD-based).

I thought that early on, and looked (several times!) for something else besides OpenSCAD that would fill the bill (i.e. language-based CAD). There were some dozen projects, and most of them had been abandoned. The closest I got was in using libfive, an f-rep system with a binding to Scheme. But it was too easy for me to cause it to put out no shape at all, and to take a long time doing it.

Use a C interface if you can (much easier), cxx if you absolutely need C++ features.

You can try using Cxx to interop with C++ from Rust.

Google has invested a lot of money also in https://cxx.rs/ so is not as a big deal at it should be using C++ with Rust

Early on, Rust’s goal was to improve Firefox, a large C++ codebase. A bunch of language design decisions were made to ensure this could work well.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s always super easy. C++ interoperated with C even more easily: just compile your code with the new compiler! With Rust, it’s more like FFI.

https://cxx.rs/ is at the forefront here.

There's a crate with a handy guide for doing just that: https://cxx.rs/

It's very doable. In general, the cxx crate is your friend if you want to interoperate with C++. I haven't used it, because since I stopped using UE4 in 2018 I don't use C++, but a couple of my friends who do use C++ like cxx.

As for Rust interop, you can use the plain C FFI both ways (which enables the interop with Python and numpy, in pyo3), but there's also been some work on interop with C++ (to limited extent, of course), see https://cxx.rs.

Does this still bypass Cargo when building Rust and call rustc directly? IMO that practice is horrible for the Rust ecosystem. It brings the chaos of C/C++ build systems to the Rust world, where developers only care about their preferred build system and make life hard for others. https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx/issues/462

Using C libraries from Rust is straightforward with bindgen. Using C++-libraries is less so, but should be doable using cxx. Fortunately, I haven't had a need for that myself, so I can't say how much of a hassle it is.

Brave Browser has some Rust components too (e.g. the adblocking engine). Rust in C++ works very well for components with a small, well-defined API surface that involve a lot of logic. You only need to build a small FFI layer for the direct interfaces between the two languages. CXX [1] makes this even easier, too.

Brave is definitely not aiming to convert the entire browser to Rust, but it's increasingly chosen for new development.

[1] https://cxx.rs/