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unholinesstoday at 7:17 PM1 replyview on HN

Solidworks has VBA macros, which (on top of being poorly documented and unstable) subvert to the whole benefit of parametric CAD. Once you're creating features with a macro, you naturally want to edit them, but you also naturally want to rerun the macro itself to create them differently. It's like editing generated code and it's not a viable long-term setup.

FeatureScript is a different beast. It actually runs as part of regeneration in Onshape. Standard features (extrude, loft...) are also defined in FeatureScript, so your custom features are the same first-class citizens with a interactive GUIs and stable updates to upstream changes. You can freely mix interactive CAD and custom code by adding standard features and custom features.


Replies

fainpultoday at 9:29 PM

> runs as part of regeneration

You can do that in FreeCAD. Performance is horribly slow in my experience, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

https://wiki.freecad.org/Scripted_objects

https://wiki.freecad.org/Create_a_FeaturePython_object_part_...