Extend this to Autodesk Shape Manager about acis-python3 HOT 2 CLOSED

Thanks @goatchurchprime

I know some of the story of Autodesk forking ACIS (I guess ACIS R13?) thanks to the forum that Spatial closed permanently last year. The forum was a valuable resource for me, even though nobody was answering the questions lately.

I also have a semi-working SWIG wrapper for ACIS R26 but I had to do a lot of tricks to make it partially work (and I feel that the reason is that I only have the runtime and the distributed headers, not the fork itself) and it only works with a specific version of SWIG. I could tell tons of stories about ACIS, its bugs and issues that I encountered, SWIG and Boost.Python but I don't think it would be good to expose these publicly. I've never had the chance to try pybind11 and some people I met in the conferences say that it is way better than SWIG and Boost.Python. Doing everything with Python's native C API was a personal experiment for me and I feel that I somehow was able to create an extensible working Python wrapper for ACIS.

It won't be correct, if I say everything is perfect here. The code in this repository still needs a lot of extra work. I know it is already messy (same code everywhere, not the perfect application of Python C API, requires C++ to C mapping and so) and it definitely requires some documentation, especially on how to create a license file, but it somehow works on Windows and Ubuntu LTS variants.

Enough from my side. I completely agree with you about the issues of the industry. I wish there could be a way to fix it, but developing another kernel wouldn't do that. Somehow, these teams need to sit together and work it out but I feel that it is also impossible due to corporate politics. I think Spatial has some recent work on running ACIS or CGM on the web but for some reason, they killed its web page.

Since the discussion is about open-source, I think you have already heard about openCASCADE. The good thing with openCASCASE is that it comes with a SWIG interface (http://www.pythonocc.org/) instead of Scheme or C#.

from acis-python3.

Please don't hesitate to to use the code and work on this extension. It would seem to be an impossible job for me due to time limitations. I am closing this issue now. Feel free to contact me if you need any help.

from acis-python3.