An Open Source Appliance Foundation Project, that lets users draft physical objects in lua.
Do we need a new CAD program?
- The best CAD programs are paid and their free tiers change policies often.
- Their Version Control is built into the application reducing the compatibility with the version control systems we use.
- I have not enjoyed using freecad, tinkercad or openscad, sorry.
But why Lua? Yeah I know there are already quite a few CAD options out there... LAD does have some reasons to exist and they are:
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Lua is a great language for non-programmers.
- The entire language fits into a relatively small book.
- Its designed so that you don't have to teach the user computer science to use it.
- numbers do not need casting
- users don't have to understand why we start counting at 0
- users only have to learn one data structure
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It is small no matter how you measure
- The entire language fits into a relatively small book. (echo?)
- Can run in a microcontroller
- lets c/c++ do the heavy lifting
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Very Mature
- Lua is 28 years old
- Lua is used in many AAA games
- Free and Open Source
- Version Controllable
- Headlessness has priority
- A view port could be added as a debugging and validation tool
- Parametric (obviously)
- pythonless... python has too many issues for me to love.
- There will be NO new filetypes only .lua .cmaketext .c .cpp .csv etc...
- ci/cd friendly
- Because im building on mac os i had to make a couple changes to the lua makefile. You would have to do the same for now, I will make a more cross-platform build command soon (like when my ci-cd pipeline exists and i have cross-platform runners).
- Until/if this projects gets some traction im going to be using it as a place to test out ideas. For example im trying to use unsigned 64 bit integers for all geometry... the idea being that it might mean that i wont have to deal with floating point errors.