Replicad is designed primarily to be used as a library with the web editor as a helper.
FluidCAD is designed to be used as full CAD package code + UI. I've outlined some of my motives in recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721997
+1 for what adrian_b answered above.
All the promotion are for free open source projects and none of them is profitable.
I think this is totally fine, people like to know about alternatives and all these tools are for the purpose of learning and making parametric CAD more approachable to users. They have same goal with different implementation.
I have added a caching mechanism; objects are computed only when their parameters change. When an object change, all objects after it will recompute. This will probably need to be revised in future with more efficient algorithm to find what objects are affected by the change and recompute only those.
Yep, topological naming solving is a hard problem to solve. It took FreeCAD many years to get it to work correctly. That's why I went with indices for this version. You can also use filters like extrusion.endFaces(face().arc()) to get only arc edges.
When the user click on a region we insert a 2D point, then the extrude feature will find the nearest face.
I have experimented with adding this picking logic to selections too select().pick() which will probably be merged in future releases.
The interactive region extrude feature is designed specifically for fast modeling at the expense of making the model "not so parametric". When user pick a region, the raycasted point is inserted/hardcoded in the code. e.g extrude(100).pick([100, 100])
So if the sketch dimensions change, there is a chance the point will fall outside the region boundaries which will break it.
It is preferred to use proper boolean operations in sketch mode to define regions while keeping it parametric.
The interactive region extrude is there for when you want fast modeling/prototyping.
The constraints solving took a good amount of thinking while designing FluidCAD. At first I tried to make it all declarative where user just create unconstrained geometries then define constraints, something like:
const l1 = line();
const c1 = circle();
// define constraint
l1.length(100).position(x, y).tangentTo(c1)
...
Then I decided against this idea because it results in too much typing + the constraint solver implementation is not trivial and there is not much web based open source solvers. I went with a mixed approach instead between declarative and imperative. https://fluidcad.io/docs/guides/sketching/constrained-geomet...
you can also sketch on faces sketch(extrusion.endFace(), ...) which will extract the plane from face and put the starting point on the center for convinience.
Assemblies will come but not anytime soon. I did some research and tests and it is going to be a challenge. You can still add multiple parts in one scene but no actual joints implementation.
Based on opencascade wasm.
Features in the docs.
Api coming soon.
No it was not, I started this before I even started using coding agents. It took many iterations and rewrites before settling on the current shape. After building the core features I started using claude to add more features, improve test coverage and generte docs.
I'm working on one with features you mentioned, with the main goal to make the workflow similar to mainstream CAD. Will release the first dev version in less than a month.
I'm working on a parametric, feature based CAD by code software which should be released next month.
LLMs are good at generating code. It should be able to handle any complex task given a good documentation. I'm planning to write an mcp for providing feedback to the LLM but that will come at a later stage.
The code is based on js and opencascade with a feature rich vscode extension.
Never encountered this issue until I tested GLM and Kimi K2 models.
Opus and Sonnet seems to be good at handling this, even when giving them a code with open tags, they'll know where to put the closing tag quickly.
