Used d3 on two different react projects. Charts weren’t the main feature but quite big still.
When the dust settled I got a feeling React+SVG had made d3 obsolete - there’s some value in d3 zoom and interaction code, but their intricate system of data sources and auto updating views felt out of time. Maybe it was cutting edge stuff during jquery years, but modern FE frameworks do it better nowadays. Without the need to learn yet another api.
Again, I’m not an expert on d3, just someone who spent ~12-18months maintaining couple visualizations (among other things)
FTFY
What if general demise of startups (due to funding drought, covid, market saturation, bad timing aka world wasn’t ready for our idea, or leave your favorite excuse in comments) also impacted open startups? And what if they weren’t successful because open but because market was easier?
I spent quite some time in FreeCAD, then switched to makerjs. For the last two covid years "code cad" designs for laser cutter have consumed most of my free time.
I am also building my own online editor with focus on UX and live reloading [1].
Few key learnings I had about code vs visual (tldr it's complicated):
- It works great for flat laser cut assemblies, but once you start doing t-nut and finger joints you really need to see your pieces rotated and aligned in 3D. and that's a lot of extra code
- Writing a geometry library from scratch is really hard. I tried multiple newer JS libraries (that aren't ports of OpenCASCADE / CGAL) and all of them had numerous bugs in boolean operations, offsets, etc. There's just too many corner cases, compounding errors, APIs that haven't been thought thru and became a tech debt, etc.
- Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places or building a wrong thing, but there aren't that many users interested in "writing code for a 3d printer". Very few people dropping complex code cad projects on github. It feels like everyone who does is also building their own CAD platform ;)
There are actually at least two styles that do exactly that. They are called OpenSCAD and JSCAD. The code above would be simple subtract(cube([h,w,t]), translate([h/2,w/2,t], cylinder({radius, height})))
I don't know why the article makes it sound like cadquery is superior in every way possible. Sure BREP is a lot more powerful than CSG, but with extra power comes extra learning curve. If all you ever design is 3d prints for reprap (and I'd guesstimate 95% of hackaday audience falls into that category) cadquery may be an overkill
Again, I’m not an expert on d3, just someone who spent ~12-18months maintaining couple visualizations (among other things)