PythonSCAD rocks!
On 5/14/2025 4:24 AM, edmund ronald via Discuss wrote:
One might freeze openSCAD basically as it stands now, why break
something useful?
And indeed if you want to freeze it... you can. Just don't download new
versions. Or, if you want to build from source, ask GitHub for an old
version.
The problem comes when you want one change from a new version, but don't
want another change from that version.
At work, my VP once commented to me that our customers really wanted
version X, not version X+1, but with all of the features from version X+1.
Of course, if the right people (people who are able to work on the C++
program) want to cherry-pick a feature into a fork, and omit all other
changes... they can. It's just work.
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include Javascript,
Fortran,or more appropriately APL? Is it just because Python is
relatively new and shiny, and there are a few folk in the openscad group
coders who are capable of including it, and it's more interesting
compared to adding , say, 'text' to svg output files?
Even with the fairly strict control over the development of openscad, I
sometimes find I can cause it to crash. I've been using pythonscad for a
month or so, I know it is the early stage of development, but I can make
it crash more easily, and more often (it was the same with cadview and
other spin-offs).
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with
python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
I would suggest make a stable release of 'pure openscad', without any of
the python stuff included, then those who want python can develop a fork
of that, but those who do not can develop the base code.
On 14/05/2025 12:24, edmund ronald via Discuss wrote:
I think all points of view discussed so far have merit.
One might freeze openSCAD basically as it stands now, why break
something useful? Just as TeX was frozen and serves as a base for the
widely employed LaTex macro system and environments. And then see
whether new work which allows more powerful scripting should build o
what is here or on another of the CodeCAD variants.
On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 3:39 AM Sanjeev Prabhakar via Discuss
discuss@lists.openscad.org wrote:
Thanks Leonard:
That is correct
the url: https://github.com/sprabhakar2006/openSCAD
Following files should be downloaded:
- openscad2.py
- dependencies2.scad
- dependencies.scad (optional, Initially I started writing
functions in pure openscad and very soon gave up, but still there
are a lot of useful functions written here with explanation).
for learning about the functions (kind of documentation):
- explanation of approaches\ example of various functions.pdf
In my view:
While sketching / modeling you very soon reach a point where
openSCAD native language falls short of doing things and it is
very hard to write complex functions.
Hats off to BOSL developers who have written such elaborate and
complex things in pure openscad. But despite their extraordinary
skills, there are a lot of things which still would be almost
impossible to do effectively, due to the limitation of structured
language (e.g. finding the intersection between solids, fillets in
complex cases, offsets 2d and 3d effectively for complex cases and
so on)
I am not very good at python, but still could write very complex
functions with a short study of python language. Till today, I do
not know the concept of classes in python which probably would be
very trivial for many here.
I am sure a good python programmer can write much better and can
be useful to all here.
Thanks and Regards
Sanjeev
On Tue, 13 May 2025 at 21:41, Leonard Martin Struttmann via
Discuss <discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
I think that it's at:
https://github.com/sprabhakar2006/openSCAD/tree/main
https://github.com/sprabhakar2006/openSCAD/blob/main/openscad2.py
On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 10:43 AM John David via Discuss
<discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
@Sanjeev Prabhakar <mailto:sprabhakar2006@gmail.com>,
which library? URL?
On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 9:22 PM Sanjeev Prabhakar via
Discuss <discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
Python has a lot of different libraries which could be
used to make very complex sketches.
I mostly use numpy and scipy.
For quite sometime I have not written much but I have
already written a lot of different functions. For
people who are using python can use my library. It is
quite powerful.
On Mon, 12 May, 2025, 10:53 pm Jordan Brown via
Discuss, <discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
On 5/12/2025 12:07 AM, Karl Exler via Discuss wrote:
ähmm.. for all of us, who are not Prgrammers and
who are happy to have with OpenScad a fine
modelling software..... has all this Phyton
"tamtam" any relevance for us ?
Tough question.
If you're happy with "no programming", if you
think that a "for" loop or an "if" is exotic,
then... no. But then again lots of advanced
OpenSCAD stuff won't be interesting.
If you're interested in programmatic CAD (writing
programs to produce models) and OpenSCAD's
limitations and quirks are a problem for you...
yes, definitely.
If you're somewhere in the middle... shrug, it's
something you might want to be aware of but
probably not follow in detail.
Eventually I think we might need to split the
mailing list into two or more pieces, with one
focusing on the OpenSCAD language and one on the
Python variant, and maybe another on the UI that's
shared between the two. I don't know when that
would be.
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On May 14, 2025, at 13:46, Raymond West via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org wrote:
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include Javascript, Fortran,or more appropriately APL?
JavaScript could be a decent option, as a lot of people familiar with it. The others are probably for more specially interested folks.
JavaScript has one big advantage over Python in that is offers good sandboxing support, so it can be enabled by default without any security caveats (as long as we sandbox things like networking access properly), but is has similar challenges to Python in terms of pulling in large 3rd party libraries.
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
Don't worry: The next stable release is completely decoupled from Python-related developments, and the next official binaries are very unlikely to include any Python features. Our primary goal going forward is to reduce acceptance of new features and work primarily on stabilizing existing features leading up to a new release.
-Marius
On 14.05.25 19:46, Raymond West via Discuss wrote:
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include Javascript,
Fortran,or more appropriately APL?
Enough to motivate someone to actually work on this.
Is it just because Python is relatively new and shiny, and there are
a few folk in the openscad group coders who are capable of including
it, and it's more interesting compared to adding , say, 'text' to svg
output files?
No.
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with
python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
No.
I would suggest make a stable release of 'pure openscad', without any of
the python stuff included, then those who want python can develop a fork
of that, but those who do not can develop the base code.
Again, Python has nothing to do with a potential release whatsoever.
Also, you have things the wrong way around.
Günther did pretty much all the work on the Python stuff. He
started working on this independently from the upstream OpenSCAD
work.
While doing that he provided a number of useful things that are
now part of OpenSCAD like the measurement feature. So OpenSCAD
actually benefits from someone working on OpenSCAD in general.
ciao,
Torsten.
I’m all in favor of APLScar. I programmed in APL for years.
On 14.05.25 20:10, Father Horton via Discuss wrote:
I’m all in favor of APLScar. I programmed in APL for years.
I looked at some tutorials and it's crazy and amazing :-)
({⍵,+/¯2↑⍵} ⍣ 20) (1 1)
ciao,
Torsten.
maybe 50 to 60 years ago, one of our engineers, a brilliant guy from
Finland, who designed overhead lines, and so on, decided to uses apl (we
had ibm mainframes)
He wrote three lines of code, took him all day, but it replaced about
three pages of Fortran. He came in the next day to continue, but had no
idea of what he had written. ( Fwiw, Tandy implemented apl on the trs80,
they used actual English characters, and a keyboard overlay. That worked
OK.)
I thought it would mesh nicely with the perceived awkwardness of the
openscad language.
On 14/05/2025 19:18, Torsten Paul via Discuss wrote:
On 14.05.25 20:10, Father Horton via Discuss wrote:
I’m all in favor of APLScar. I programmed in APL for years.
I looked at some tutorials and it's crazy and amazing :-)
({⍵,+/¯2↑⍵} ⍣ 20) (1 1)
ciao,
Torsten.
OpenSCAD mailing list
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Marius, I actually have already a branch with javascript and I am happy to
push it further.
However, there is also one big disadvantage to consider:
Javascript does not support named parameters like openscad and python do.
Instead, function calls have only default parameters at most which limits
the option , how primitive calls can be expressed.
Torsten: Thank you for mentioning my contribution. IMHO the biggest part is
triangles being indexed now, which is totally invisible to the user :)
On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 7:56 PM Marius Kintel via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
On May 14, 2025, at 13:46, Raymond West via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include Javascript,
Fortran,or more appropriately APL?
JavaScript could be a decent option, as a lot of people familiar with it.
The others are probably for more specially interested folks.
JavaScript has one big advantage over Python in that is offers good
sandboxing support, so it can be enabled by default without any security
caveats (as long as we sandbox things like networking access properly), but
is has similar challenges to Python in terms of pulling in large 3rd party
libraries.
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with
python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
Don't worry: The next stable release is completely decoupled from
Python-related developments, and the next official binaries are very
unlikely to include any Python features. Our primary goal going forward is
to reduce acceptance of new features and work primarily on stabilizing
existing features leading up to a new release.
-Marius
OpenSCAD mailing list
To unsubscribe send an email to discuss-leave@lists.openscad.org
At least one function I can think of that would be nice in plain
Openscad, from Pythonscad, is 'rotate_extrude'. But I expect it may need
to be named something else, maybe not, for compatibility with the
existing openscad rotate_extrude. Makes it very easy to generate screw
threads, say, with various profiles. (Oh, and 'path_extrude')
On 14/05/2025 18:57, Torsten Paul via Discuss wrote:
On 14.05.25 19:46, Raymond West via Discuss wrote:
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include
Javascript, Fortran,or more appropriately APL?
Enough to motivate someone to actually work on this.
Is it just because Python is relatively new and shiny, and there are
a few folk in the openscad group coders who are capable of including
it, and it's more interesting compared to adding , say, 'text' to svg
output files?
No.
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with
python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
No.
I would suggest make a stable release of 'pure openscad', without any
of the python stuff included, then those who want python can develop
a fork of that, but those who do not can develop the base code.
Again, Python has nothing to do with a potential release whatsoever.
Also, you have things the wrong way around.
Günther did pretty much all the work on the Python stuff. He
started working on this independently from the upstream OpenSCAD
work.
While doing that he provided a number of useful things that are
now part of OpenSCAD like the measurement feature. So OpenSCAD
actually benefits from someone working on OpenSCAD in general.
ciao,
Torsten.
OpenSCAD mailing list
To unsubscribe send an email to discuss-leave@lists.openscad.org
Actually I hope that OpenSCAD rotate_extrude is very compatible with
PythonSCAD rotate_extrude
- just with the addition that PythonSCAD has the v parameter, and is able
to extrude dynamic profiles.
If you see other incompatible differences, these are not intentional, so
let me know.
On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 10:21 PM Raymond West via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:
At least one function I can think of that would be nice in plain
Openscad, from Pythonscad, is 'rotate_extrude'. But I expect it may need
to be named something else, maybe not, for compatibility with the
existing openscad rotate_extrude. Makes it very easy to generate screw
threads, say, with various profiles. (Oh, and 'path_extrude')
On 14/05/2025 18:57, Torsten Paul via Discuss wrote:
On 14.05.25 19:46, Raymond West via Discuss wrote:
How many folk need to be interested for openscad to include
Javascript, Fortran,or more appropriately APL?
Enough to motivate someone to actually work on this.
Is it just because Python is relatively new and shiny, and there are
a few folk in the openscad group coders who are capable of including
it, and it's more interesting compared to adding , say, 'text' to svg
output files?
No.
The stable release of openscad is dated 2021, is fiddling around with
python going to further delay a stable release to the general public?
No.
I would suggest make a stable release of 'pure openscad', without any
of the python stuff included, then those who want python can develop
a fork of that, but those who do not can develop the base code.
Again, Python has nothing to do with a potential release whatsoever.
Also, you have things the wrong way around.
Günther did pretty much all the work on the Python stuff. He
started working on this independently from the upstream OpenSCAD
work.
While doing that he provided a number of useful things that are
now part of OpenSCAD like the measurement feature. So OpenSCAD
actually benefits from someone working on OpenSCAD in general.
ciao,
Torsten.
OpenSCAD mailing list
To unsubscribe send an email to discuss-leave@lists.openscad.org
OpenSCAD mailing list
To unsubscribe send an email to discuss-leave@lists.openscad.org