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:

• 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

• 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

• 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.