Forwarding it to the community: Originally shared by Rene K.

3D Printing
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Forwarding it to the community:

Originally shared by Rene K. Mueller

OpenSCAD vs OpenJsCad vs CoffeeScad

Last August 2012 #OpenJsCAD came into existance, and then #CoffeeScad in December 2012, but somehow this doesn’t work, and I like to share my brief experience with all 3 of them:

OpenSCAD: robust, fast preview, slow export of .stl, command-line interface, memory hungry, poor variable handling.

OpenJsCad: moderate fast preview, moderate fast export of .stl, no command-line interface (yet), full javascript functionality, simple local installation.

CoffeeScad: moderate fast preview, moderate fast export of .stl, no command-line interface (yet), full coffeescript & javascript functionality, no simple local installation (nodejs/coffeescript bootstrap)

Which leads to a bizarre situation that OpenSCAD is fast to develop a model, but extremely slow at exporting .stl (aka “compilation”), whereas OpenJsCad and CoffeeScad are slower in the preview (csg.js) while developing a model, but faster when exporting to .stl compared to OpenSCAD. In a way, we have the worst case here.

What would be desirable is the preview speed of OpenSCAD with the functionality of OpenJsCad (or CoffeeScad) in regards of having a full proper programming language like javascript, and CLI as OpenSCAD has for batch processing (openscad me.scad -o=me.stl)

How shall we proceed? :slight_smile:

PS: I coded some wrapper for OpenJsCad so .scad can be translated easier to .jscad, code is here: openscad.jscad by Spiritdude - Thingiverse

Cc: @Noel_Warren , @Mark_Moissette_ckaos , @Whosa_whatsis

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In a similar vein, cadmium from Jayesh of 3dtin:
http://blog.3dtin.com/2011/06/13/cadmium-solid-modelling-library-python-opensource/

This works fairly well, but I imagine porting the underlying OpenCascade library to new platforms would be painful.

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@Qitian_Dasheng_Sun_W and @Diego_Porqueras_Deez : I first posted this in my closed RepRap circle, where the discussion started and continued (just click my name to see it, you both are in my RepRap circle).

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I moved to github: https://github.com/Spiritdude/OpenSCAD.jscad and added openjscad (CLI = command-line interface) so you can render .jscad to .stl like openscad now too.

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hiiiiiiii