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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

This is great, we need more of this sort of thing. Huge kudos for making it and documenting it. I will definitely be taking it for a spin.

1) Do you plan to add 'loft'? Without it, or some other type of morphing extrude, one is severely limited in the types of shapes it is possible to create.

2) I hope you don't mind me asking, what is the psychedelic-looking image I can see a sliver of in the screenshot? It looks like a rocking desktop background.

By the way, if you're not already aware of it, you may also be interested in looking at ZenCad for inspiration. It attempts to fill a similar niche (OpenSCAD-ish modeling + OpenCascade), except it uses Python.

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Here is another programmable CAD project, Fornjot[1], also in Rust. Fornjot, too, is being actively developed.

Unfortunately it uses Rust for model description (compile times/learning curve).

That said, one could probably easily put a layer of scipting lang in-between. E.g. Rhai[2] or Lua or whatever.

And I guess if their tech is solid enough, someone will do that eventually and open a PR or fork the project. They do not use an existing geomtry kernel but do everything from scratch which makes this a very interesting endeavour.

There also seems to be a goal overlap between Fornjot and DieselCAD

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

[2] https://rhai.rs/

Hey, author of Fornjot here.

Rust was chosen as a modeling language for two reasons:

1. Since the whole project is written in Rust, it was the most straight-forward choice. No dealing with bindings to another language or a scripting language runtime for the time being. 2. To provide an interesting alternative. I suspect that there can be a nice niche for Rust, creating infrastructure for writing models (e.g. libraries for generating screw threads, that kind of stuff).

I don't think that Rust is a great language for defining CAD models. Long-term, I suspect that the preferred choice for Fornjot will be something else. But for the time being, this decision allows me to focus on the CAD kernel.

> There also seems to be a goal overlap between Fornjot and DieselCAD

Do you have a link for DieselCAD? Searching on Google only got me car results.

DieselCAD = DSLCAD = the very subject of this disussion. :)

https://github.com/DSchroer/dslcad

Ah, sorry! I missed that bit in the README and got confused :)

Thanks for checking it out. I am glad you like it.

1. Now that you have asked for it, I certainly plan on adding `loft`. Thank you for the suggestion. Looking quickly it looks quite reasonable to implement. I would expect to add it in the near future.

2. It is a digital art coloring book image that I filled in and used as a background.

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