alt Hacker NewsNice! I love code-based CAD. Eventually I want to build a tool which uses a hybrid approach: a GUI for things that are hard/tedious to express in code like complicated 2D sketches, with code as the "persistence" layer so at the end you still just have code to maintain, no binary files or piles of XML.
One of the hard parts though will be synchronizing changes between UI and code. I suppose it could start as a unidirectional flow from UI to code... if you were to generate a sketch with something like a loop, it would be hard to recover that code structure from just a bunch of resulting points and line segments.
But anyway, I'm happy to see more code-based CAD approaches pop up. I think there's still a lot to explore in this space.
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FreeCAD apparently supports OpenSCAD as well as build123d, which looks like a very nice DSL for geometry. Still no 2 way binding tho, unless you count the variable editor in the GUI.
> Nice! I love code-based CAD.
I haven't tried it yet, but I would think that coming up with variable names for all the little parts and distances and whatnot must be a nightmare! :)
And could someone read the code and understand it?
Yeah I like the idea of combining code and a visual editor of some kind. Many of my current openscad projects are just mixing code with SVG files, which is finicky and feels like it could easily be improved.
> I love code-based CAD.
So do I. A lot.
But wait until you try to pair it with an Agentic AI, it will simply blow you away.
Until, that is, you realize LLM's have strictly no sense of how 3D geometry works, but still, it's amazing.
For my airplane design, I've used Rhino3D (which is 3d modeling, not CAD), and used their Python-based plug-in API to create a very custom, limited scope parametric CAD on it... using a mix of geometric and aerodynamic parameters, and using vortex lattice methods to bridge between them. So the wing chord (MAC) can be set in centimeters, but the wing span set to achieve a specific modeled climb rate. It's all very ad hoc, but also lovely to develop in. Hit run, in three seconds have a freshly-generated OML, use Rhino's UI to make a few changes, confirm I like them, then move those changes to code and re-run. Hit undo/redo a few times to compare the hand-drawn and generated versions, then move on to the next feature.