in reply to Re^2: "Magic tools" that take the fun away (Releng/DevOps/Cloud/Virtualization/Container/Server References)
in thread "Magic tools" that take the fun away

Make is a good build algorithm, but a clunky scripting language. I'd much rather have a Make library for perl and then let a perl script assemble all the dependencies into some object and then execute it with a method call. I repeated this experience with OpenSCAD. I loved it at first, but then gradually got annoyed about the way it implements conditional statements (i.e. functional programming) and lacks macros or named anchors on the model, and now I really wish that I had a CAD library for Perl where I could just code up the missing bits myself right in the 3D model.

Domain-specific languages are great at solving domain-specific problems... until you want to do something that the author didn't plan for.

  • Comment on Re^3: "Magic tools" that take the fun away (Releng/DevOps/Cloud/Virtualization/Container/Server References)

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Re^4: "Magic tools" that take the fun away (Releng/DevOps/Cloud/Virtualization/Container/Server References)
by etj (Priest) on Jun 18, 2024 at 02:49 UTC
    ...now I really wish that I had a CAD library for Perl where I could just code up the missing bits myself right in the 3D model.
    Can I interest you in PDL::Graphics::TriD and PDL::IO::STL? Only one careful owner :-)

    Also I gather haj is doing some CAD-like stuff at the moment.

[reply]
      My grand plan was to finish Alien::OpenCASCADE and then build a companion module for Math::3Space that makes it easy to specify triangle meshes and uses OpenCASCADE to perform solid modeling operations on them (union/difference/intersection) in the style of OpenSCAD, but procedural with objects. Then, combine those two with OpenGL::Sandbox to view it. (I considered using OpenSCAD's underlying C libraries, but read that they were quite a bit less performant than OpenCASCADE)

      I haven't finished reading your PDL version of Math::3Space, but my first impression so far is that I'd like to make my modules PDL-aware so that they can read and write to ndarrays (like created by your trigrid3d or loaded from STL), and then for parallel processing just make new modules in the PDL namespace that perform these same operations the PDL-way.

[reply]

In Section Meditations