Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program

• fornjot

  35 1,882 10.0 Rust

  Early-stage b-rep CAD kernel, written in the Rust programming language.

Hey, author of Fornjot here.

> The modeling language for Fornjot is Rust. To me, this seems like an akward language to write models in.

I fully agree! Given that Fornjot is written in Rust, starting with Rust as the modeling language was just the most straight-forward option.

But Fornjot is architected to be language-agnostic. Right now, it uses a plugin system based on dynamic linking, and you could plug anything in there that can generate C-ABI-compatible structs (the plan is to replace that with a system based on WASM).

In addition, I've started splitting Fornjot into self-contained libraries[1]. Once that effort is complete, there will be lots of ways to make Fornjot available to other languages.

That said, I think there's merit in having options when using Code-CAD, and Rust is certainly different enough from the typical alternatives to be valuable. I don't think it will ever be the best option for regular CAD modeling, but it might have a niche in infrastructure code that CAD models (written in other languages) use.

[1] https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot/issues/141

• truck

  11 563 9.2 Rust

  Truck is a Rust CAD Kernel.

  

I will definitely keep reading and learning, as well as gaining practical implementation experience. We'll have to see how that goes, and what the solution will end up being.

> Another direction you could take is to define just the API, and use the opencascade kernel (like FreeCAD) until the rest of your code is ready.

A CAD kernel is the central dependency for any CAD program, and I feel that it would be wrong to just use one and accept its limitations. I need to be able to take ownership, to work on it directly. OpenCASCADE is a huge pile of C++ code, which is the opposite of all that. (Not saying it's wrong to use in general, just that I'm the wrong guy to work on a huge pile of C++ code.)

I've considered using Truck[1], but decided not to do that for now. I really want to see what I can come up with. If that doesn't work out, at least I'll be in a much better decision to decide what other option would be best.

[1] https://github.com/ricosjp/truck

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• gluon

  14 3,119 7.6 Rust

  A static, type inferred and embeddable language written in Rust. (by gluon-lang)

  

This should be a good use-case for rust-based scripting languages, I think.

I loosely followed a project of that kind a while ago, I don't quite remember if it was Gluon [0] or Dyon [1]. Not sure if these are still active, or if another competitor showed up in meantime.

___

[0] https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon

[1] https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon

• dyon

  10 1,729 5.4 Rust

  A rusty dynamically typed scripting language

  

This should be a good use-case for rust-based scripting languages, I think.

I loosely followed a project of that kind a while ago, I don't quite remember if it was Gluon [0] or Dyon [1]. Not sure if these are still active, or if another competitor showed up in meantime.

___

[0] https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon

[1] https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon

• constraints

  1 1 10.0

  An experiment in writing algebraic constraint solvers for 3D CAD (by phkahler)

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