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Well, as a professional mechanical engineer with 20 years of cad experience, I disagree that FreeCAD is “good enough for most needs”. It didn’t even have assemb

Well, as a professional mechanical engineer with 20 years of cad experience, I disagree that FreeCAD is “good enough for most needs”. It didn’t even have assembly support until a preview of that feature was added to a fork a month or so ago, and it was a non-starter before that. I currently believe FreeCAD is the best hope we have but there’s a long road ahead before it is “good enough”. As far as storing cad files as you describe, how does that interface with OpenCASCADE file formats? The data storage is related to the CAD kernel I think, so it might be difficult to move to a “store models as code” storage model.

RomanKuzmenko 3y ago
That’s why I said other CAD tools can be used for some workflows. For most humans interacting with technology nowadays out there FreeCAD will do. Anyway, even if I’m wrong about FreeCAD, PartCAD doesn’t have much to do with what happens between “Load” and “Save”. CAD is a tool that some people will use. PartCAD should support as many of those tools as possible. The question of format used to store part info is more relevant to PartCAD. However I do not think PartCAD should prescribe any. PartCAD must be modular and support as many formats as it can. And let the competition decide. Maybe the supported/compatible CAD kernels will contribute to the competition of file formats. Maybe the file format chosen by the community (e.g. for LLM related reasons) will contribute to what CAD tools support. We’ll see in 20 years. I personally don’t think the community at a whole will gravitate towards anything like OpenCASCADE file formats. I find CadQuery and build123d more promising (no matter what’s under their hood at the moment). I believe it must be human-readable (and, thus, LLM-readable) text. But CadQuery and build123d are not the end of the evolution. I’m sure we will face next technology iterations that are at least more LLM friendly, secure (e.g. to prevent arbitrary I/O from code), and more structured (to help retain the code structure and formatting in the “Load”-“Change”-“Save” cycle). PartCAD will be there to facilitate modular design and collaboration, and to include as many people and their tools as possible. Not to facilitate any closed formats or tool ecosystems that commercial tool vendors are trying to prescribe to us today, no matter how convincing their arguments sound. Large profits enable generation of very convincing arguments. No matter how difficult it is going to be to “store models as code”, I personally believe the humanity will succeed at that. However PartCAD will support all common file formats. It currently (2 days after a preview release which somehow went huge) supports CadQuery, build123d and STEP files.

RomanKuzmenko 3y ago

That’s why I said other CAD tools can be used for some workflows. For most humans interacting with technology nowadays out there FreeCAD will do. Anyway, even if I’m wrong about FreeCAD, PartCAD doesn’t have much to do with what happens between “Load” and “Save”. CAD is a tool that some people will use. PartCAD should support as many of those tools as possible. The question of format used to store part info is more relevant to PartCAD. However I do not think PartCAD should prescribe any. PartCAD must be modular and support as many formats as it can. And let the competition decide. Maybe the supported/compatible CAD kernels will contribute to the competition of file formats. Maybe the file format chosen by the community (e.g. for LLM related reasons) will contribute to what CAD tools support. We’ll see in 20 years. I personally don’t think the community at a whole will gravitate towards anything like OpenCASCADE file formats. I find CadQuery and build123d more promising (no matter what’s under their hood at the moment). I believe it must be human-readable (and, thus, LLM-readable) text. But CadQuery and build123d are not the end of the evolution. I’m sure we will face next technology iterations that are at least more LLM friendly, secure (e.g. to prevent arbitrary I/O from code), and more structured (to help retain the code structure and formatting in the “Load”-“Change”-“Save” cycle). PartCAD will be there to facilitate modular design and collaboration, and to include as many people and their tools as possible. Not to facilitate any closed formats or tool ecosystems that commercial tool vendors are trying to prescribe to us today, no matter how convincing their arguments sound. Large profits enable generation of very convincing arguments. No matter how difficult it is going to be to “store models as code”, I personally believe the humanity will succeed at that. However PartCAD will support all common file formats. It currently (2 days after a preview release which somehow went huge) supports CadQuery, build123d and STEP files.