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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, Autodesk Fusion 360 is a Qt app and it's very slow compared to similar tools (like SolidWorks).

Fusion 360 is kind of a mess that's gotten way out of control. I enjoy how the navigation cube can literally draw outside the boundaries of the window as you move the window around. I don't think that's a Qt problem, I think they glued ten different UI libraries together to keep their legacy code working.

Fusion is probably the newest software product that Autodesk rents. In fact it was Carl Bass' passion project. Unfortunately Autodesk's software development process is… broken.

The fact that it's made by Autodesk is probably the reason that it's slow, not because it uses Qt. Various Autodesk products have been clunky, buggy, crashy, slow pieces of crap (I'm looking at you, Maya) since before they were migrated to Qt.

The UI is totally performant for me. The only time it's bogged down was when I was modelling something with > 100k mesh triangles. Or when I do a long UI-blocking processing operation (which isn't in the qt codepath)./

Have you used SolidWorks or other similar applications? I use both and the Fusion UI is very laggy and unresponsive in comparison. If that's not your experience, maybe there's something wrong and I should reinstall it...

I have not used SolidWorks. It costs far more money and is aimed at a totally different market.

What I'm trying to understand: are you talking about when you ask Fusion 360 to do something expensive the UI stops responding for a bit? I certainly see that, but it's not Qt that is the source of problems.

No, I'm talking more about how quickly the UI draws and how quickly it responds when you interact with it. When typing and tabbing around the UI, does it react instantly or after a delay? SolidWorks is decently response, Fusion 360 feels slow.

Nope, I'm not seeing any responsiveness problems. Note: I have a 8-core AMD w/ 64GB RAM and a high end graphics card. Clicking on any UI element (such as Create to open the Create menu) seems to lead to a response in under 100ms and if I do something that requires the net, it shows me a spinner while it does the loading.

Do you work with huge models?

SolidWorks actually had/has a product aimed at the hobbyist crowd just like Fusion. Used to be you could get a free copy with membership in some aviation related professional org.

I had solidworks sales people contact me and we chatted. No matter what i tried, they wanted to charge me multiple thousands a year. Any free copy would eventually stop working for example when I updated to a new version. I'm happy with Fusion 360, it solves a collection of problems for me well enough that unless I see a similar program for less money (I already became proficient in FreeCAD and OpenSCAD before switching to Fusion 360), I don't plan to switch since I've already invested a lot of effort into mastering the fairly complicated user interface and feature set provided.

Experimental Aircraft Association used to toss in a free copy of the SolidWorks "education premium" product or whatever it was called. EAA membership is on the order or $40/yr so there was some migration after Autodesk decided to gut the hobbyist version of Fusion. SW realized they could do the same so the offer is now half off the cost of a castrated social-media-ified version of SolidWorks (3DEXPERIENCE).

For hobbyist stuff at least Fusion is by far the least painful option, but the bar is set really, really low. FreeCAD is a gigantic clusterfuck to put it charitably (akin to using an awl to carve a drawing out of cardboard versus pencil and paper). OpenSCAD is neat but it really suffers because OpenSCAD is basically developed and maintained by a single person.

The actual processing is slow, not the UI

Fusion is slow in large part because it makes a ton of HTTP requests. The Qt part is fairly performant.

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