FreeCAD isn't even mentioned, but it implements precisely that "work on geometry step by step" workflow.

It is mentioned on author's website though. https://www.fornjot.app/blog/the-world-needs-another-cad-pro...

>There is lots of interesting space between "hobbyist" and "can justify to spend loads of money", and I tend to find myself right in the middle of that.

Feels like an indie cad era is upon us. Plasticity, mart3d, antimony ..

>A CAD application, especially one with a custom CAD kernel, is a huge project.

What I've always found amusing is that there are actually quite a few geometric modeling kernels and every one of them costs a ton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel

FreeCAD is GUI-based though, not code-first like Fornjot. A better comparison would be CadQuery (https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html) or Cascade Studio (https://zalo.github.io/CascadeStudio/), both of which are code-first and based on the same CAD kernel as FreeCAD.

open source effort would be rather spent on UI/UX over CGAL or Libfive. The project is a dead end because they choose to reimplement inverse CSG instead of reusing years of R&D or any FRep library

Hey, creator of Fornjot here. I had experimented with f-rep for years before switching to b-rep for the current iteration of Fornjot. I came to the conclusion that f-rep, while neat, is too limited for what I intend to do. I came to a similar conclusion regarding the mesh-based approach of CGAL.

I've written more about that here: https://www.fornjot.app/blog/why-fornjot-is-using-boundary-r...

Only dead fish go with the flow.

please, code first cad is not the way to go ! Did you ever use a CAD software for a proper project ? The hard stuff is in the UX/UI… or just put a DSL over CGAL and dall ir a day.

I love Rust, I love code first approach, I like this project, but the average guy trying to put a threaded hole onto an extruded profile will hardly code it…

There are no good libraries to build open source CAD on top of really. CGAL doesn't support fillets or chamfers, and you'd really want a geometric constraint solver. I think building code first is a good first step.

Code-first CAD is the way to go for some users and some use cases. I personally won't make any stronger claim than that, nor will I accept any sweeping claims to the opposite.

The average guy can keep doing what they're doing. Fornjot will not take GUI-based CAD away from them.