alt Hacker NewsNot even two years ago writing your own BREP kernel was considered to be out of reach for even the most determined dedicated hardcore engineering teams that weren't extremely well funded. Now, it seems tractable and may finally get us out of the dependence on proprietary kernels that has plagued this industry for decades.
Yeah, I know. I started this project earlier this year because of my own frustration with the software ecosystem and that the major CAD vendors is charging thousands of dollar to add STEP 242 support and because of proprietary lock-in and locking everything behind cloud, and was trying to see if I can accomplish this with AI.
I'm not going to pretend this is easy: I actually quit multiple times for this project because I ran into the same walls that everyone else ran to: arbitrary 3D boolean operations is HARD,(Surprisingly, I actually didn't have that much trouble with fillets/chamfers because I kept them pretty bounded) and the approach I've finally taken to solve it is pretty insane. Essentially, the final architecture is more like "LLVM for 3D objects" compiler stack than it is traditional BREP kernel. Would love to talk about the technical deep dives if people want to hear it.
Also, feel free to write UI wrappers around it, because I'm pretty bad at UI design myself.