As a Mechanical Engineer, I would absolutely love to see something like this (or Freecad/OpenSCAD/etc) step up to the "Blender level" to functionally compete against Solidworks. Its expensive, its buggy, and it requires a beast of a computer to function in any semi-respectable way.<p>Does anyone have any experience in the software side of the industry to help explain why nothing open source is able to step up in a meaningful way?
Our company wrote C++ and Ruby wrappers around BRL-CAD a number of years ago for scripted CAD, here is the tutorial for the radio example:<p><a href="https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pd...</a><p>We used it for a few small projects. BRL-CAD also has Tcl scripting.<p>We've currently switched to pure Common Lisp and F-rep modeling for scripted CAD. This is the old CL one (again wrapped C++) we are porting:<p><a href="https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero</a>
I used this in 1999 or so when I had just started out using linux. It was a huge pain to get running. It was for US citizens only or something, and I had to have my parents write to the government requesting the decryption key for the installer. It may have required something crazy like a fax.<p>After I got it running I had some trouble getting it to do things and wrote to the email address asking for example files. Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached.
I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps we were using it for something it was not intended to do, or not the way it was meant to be used. I knew my way around the Pro/E interface and it was miles ahead of BRL-CAD. But even CADDS-IV was better than BRL-CAD. I can only speculate that being government-funded, the dev team for BRL-CAD had to make brutal decisions regarding when the feature set was "good enough," because they were working with a very limited budget tied to specific program goals. I don't know. I do know that using BRL-CAD was hellish back in the day.
> <i>The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.</i><p>Wow.