I have been trying to understand and document the windows build process for OpenSCAD so that Marius and Clifford might soon be able to publish a new release.
While doing this Marius and I got talking. Specifically he wanted to know whether the work I had done for RapCAD on variables would work in the OpenSCAD back end. I told him a bit about the parser I had implemented, and how I thought that a strong concept of Statements within the language syntax would be needed to support this. We agreed that (like many projects) the OpenSCAD language has evolved over time, and its evolution had led the design to a more Declarative syntax rather than a Procedural one.
Marius also asked me whether it makes sense to write my own language or rather use an existing one. I explained that my main motivation for re-writing alot of what already exists in OpenSCAD was
- I was finding it fun
- I can understand things much easier if its my own work.
- Its easier to do research in a new project, than try and modify some existing codebase.
l like to think of RapCAD as my own research experiment, into an ‘Openscad 2.0’ language spec, and other potential re-factorings that might someday be applied. Marius added that in many ways that was what Clifford had done, when he took MetaCAD, and re-wrote it in C over a summer holiday.
Another thing we talked about is the possibility that some day OpenSCAD might drop CGAL as its back end rendering subsystem, and perhaps adopt something like OpenCASCADE. It makes sense to try and integrate RapCAD’s scripting engine with the OpenSCAD rendering engine in much the same way as efforts like pySCAD have done.
One idea that Marius presented to me was that of a low level API that projects like pySCAD and RapCAD could use. The API might be text based vastly simplified to a description/modeling language that only supports the basic primitives such as polyhedrons, which all other shapes can be defined in terms of, as well as csg operation nodes, and transformations which can all be defined in terms of multmatrix.
In summary I am focusing my efforts on connecting up my existing code to just the rendering functions of OpenSCAD, and modifying OpenSCAD so that it has a generic API for projects like pySCAD, SolidPython and CloudSCAD can use as well.
Giles Bathgate 