Show HN: LuaCAD – Parametric CAD Scripted in Lua

62 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by adius
(luacad.ad-si.com)

13 Comments

fhn

3 hours ago

Does this have a web-based playground? I find https://www.pythonscad.org/playground/ to be nice to try out the project.

adius

3 hours ago

Agreed! I’m already working on it, but it’s not quite ready yet. ETA is 1-2 weeks.

tolugenius

5 hours ago

Really interesting! I actually use freecad so I'm use to that layer of the process but I'll check this out. Also good to see the work being done in modeling software these days

manny_rat

5 hours ago

Love it! OpenSCAD has very painful syntax. Is it possible to easily do bevels/chamfers or does it have the same limitations as OpenSCAD there?

adius

5 hours ago

Thanks! It natively supports all BOSL2 functions which include a chamfer argument (https://github.com/revarbat/BOSL/wiki#common-arguments). So that makes it quite straightforward to add chamfers to everything!

kragen

3 hours ago

Can you fillet unions? Like, if I union a cube with a smaller cube sticking out of its side, can I make a fillet so that the edge where the two cubes' faces intersect doesn't become a stress concentration point for cracks to start at? This is OpenSCAD's primary weakness from my point of view.

addaon

4 hours ago

Which is what separates us from the animals.

adastra22

2 hours ago

Quite easy to add chamfers to everything in the CAD file. But your manufacturing guy is going to strangle you...

WillAdams

5 hours ago

Is it able to access the file system and write/read files?

I've been doing that via PythonSCAD for my current project https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview and it might be interesting to do a re-write in another language.

adius

5 hours ago

Yes, it executes in a full fledged Lua environment. So you can do all the things you expect do be able to do with Lua!

I’d pick Lua over Python any day, but maybe that’s just me. ;-)

WillAdams

3 hours ago

I've had good success w/ using Lua in LuaLaTeX, so hopefully a good fit for me to exercise my programming chops. I think it will be interesting to maintain two parallel versions for comparison/contrast. Thanks!

adastra22

2 hours ago

Isn't OpenSCAD's limited (non-Turing complete) language a feature?

adius

2 hours ago

I'm pretty sure it's Turing complete by now. If it was conceptualized as a limited language and only became a full fledged programming language over time, it would certainly explain all its weird warts. (Here is some more details: https://github.com/ad-si/LuaCAD#why-lua) I guess 3D modeling is just too complex for a simple, but limited DSL.

Lua is easier to use, faster, and more feature-rich. It's one of those rare occasions when a new solution is actually better in every single way.