7 ms·

BRL-CAD

74 points by aparks517 4y ago

forgotpwd16 4y ago
Was gonna ask why not link the homepage instead but apparently the wiki is linked as About page from the project's homepage.
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  That's honestly not a bad idea in general. Wikipedia does a better job describing most software than the landing page typically does. That said, BRL-CAD seems to be an exception and describes itself very well in large text above the fold! 10/10
dkga 4y ago
Silly me thought this was something interesting about the Brazilian Real - Canadian Dollar exchange rate!
- fcoury 4y ago
  Came here to say this :-)
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  I thought exactly the same thing!
digdugdirk 4y ago
As a Mechanical Engineer, I would absolutely love to see something like this (or Freecad/OpenSCAD/etc) step up to the "Blender level" to functionally compete against Solidworks. Its expensive, its buggy, and it requires a beast of a computer to function in any semi-respectable way. Does anyone have any experience in the software side of the industry to help explain why nothing open source is able to step up in a meaningful way?
- gh02t 4y ago
  CSG and CAD are just really hard to get right from scratch technically, with lots of math and edge cases and a massive number of features and optimizations you need to implement to hit minimum viability. Add to that the UI on top of the underlying geometry engine is inherently complicated and is a considerable software engineering problem in its own right. Plus the big players have so much momentum and offer free/nearly free (in terms of cost) options that are really slick and powerful e.g. Fusion360 or OnShape. Blender and KiCAD are examples of similar semi-niche professional tools that have been successful against similar barriers, but I still am not optimistic. Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm praying for, personally.
  - PostOnce 4y ago
    Fusion360 keeps getting worse and worse, they revoke features and jack the price every few months. At some point open source becomes the better value, at least there you know features won't be stolen or the price increased without notice
    - buildbot 4y ago
      Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION TIMES if you dns block it…
      - Dracophoenix 4y ago
        Any alternatives you'd recommend?
        buildbot 4y ago
        No, I have been looking extensively trying to find a decent option. Possibly Alibre through a VM? Solid edge is another possibility, still a subscription service though.
    - gh02t 4y ago
CmdrLoskene 4y ago
I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps we were using it for something it was not intended to do, or not the way it was meant to be used. I knew my way around the Pro/E interface and it was miles ahead of BRL-CAD. But even CADDS-IV was better than BRL-CAD. I can only speculate that being government-funded, the dev team for BRL-CAD had to make brutal decisions regarding when the feature set was "good enough," because they were working with a very limited budget tied to specific program goals. I don't know. I do know that using BRL-CAD was hellish back in the day.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  This comment would increase tremendously in value if you said something about which version of BRL-CAD you used.
  - CmdrLoskene 4y ago
    Unfortunately I have forgotten the version. This was in the early 90s.
- threatripper 4y ago
  Did you have many different problems with BRL-CAD or was it connected to specific features? While I can't speak for BRL-CAD my experience with FreeCad which uses OpenCascade has been mixed. The chamfer/fillet tool there is just broken. If you use that and change some dimension it is likely to randomly crash. So, overall my experience has been ranging from rock solid to total trash depending on which features you use and what kind of models you create with it. The key question is "what do the developers use it for?" which should give you a hint for what kind of problem it is made.
  - yetihehe 4y ago
justinsaccount 4y ago
I used this in 1999 or so when I had just started out using linux. It was a huge pain to get running. It was for US citizens only or something, and I had to have my parents write to the government requesting the decryption key for the installer. It may have required something crazy like a fax. After I got it running I had some trouble getting it to do things and wrote to the email address asking for example files. Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached.
- rch 4y ago
  > Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached. That's kind of awesome. I built it from source a few years after that and didn't have to deal with any headaches at all.
- hulitu 4y ago
  This is what kept me away from it. You won't have many users when you encrypt your files and the user has to request decription keys from .mil mail addresses.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stew-j 4y ago
Our company wrote C++ and Ruby wrappers around BRL-CAD a number of years ago for scripted CAD, here is the tutorial for the radio example: https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pdf https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pd... We used it for a few small projects. BRL-CAD also has Tcl scripting. We've currently switched to pure Common Lisp and F-rep modeling for scripted CAD. This is the old CL one (again wrapped C++) we are porting: https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero
- brlcad 4y ago
  That radio tutorial conversion is awesome. Looks like the code is at http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/tovero/trunk/ http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/tovero/trunk/ ? That's some impressive work, particularly some of the advanced geometry entity mapping going on in there.
  - stew-j 4y ago
    Thanks! That is the right repo. If you want to use it, I hold the copyright and we could relicense it. "My kingdom for a voice" [1] or maybe "My kingdom for a horse" [2] we did post an item about it on the BRL-CAD mailing list. The Common Lisp community didn't really notice Tovero 2.0 for Common Lisp either. I was actually thinking about trying a Common Lisp wrapper of BRL-CAD, or maybe doing a native CL port. [1] REM, Document, "King of Birds", 1987 (Anybody know a good marketer?) [2] Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5 Scene 4 (a Tovero is a type of horse)
    - brlcad 4y ago
      It looks like your e-mail was the victim of my paternity leave... it's still in my inbox. I do recall Dr. Rai commenting on your post, but didn't get a chance to explore it in any detail at the time. Remotely related, I've always thought a really fun lisp project would be to create an Emacs major mode for BRL-CAD. Either something to explore .g data (like tar mode) or an interactive editor like mged with lisp wrapping BRL-CAD's libged editing library.
sneak 4y ago
> The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC. Wow.
- stew-j 4y ago
  Another interesting fact: The BRL of BRL-CAD is the Ballistic Research Laboratory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Research_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Research_Laboratory which developed, along with the Penn, the first general-purpose digital computer ENIAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
  - brlcad 4y ago
    Another fun fact, BRL-CAD was started by Mike Muuss, author of the 'ping' networking tool. Brilliant computer scientist. Also, while it's evolved, the codebase predates nearly everything .. ansi c, c++, tcp/ip, opengl, version control, .. actively developed and funded since 1979.
    - bch 4y ago
      > version control /me waves constructively, solidly at `brlcad Your list looks good until “version control”, for which at least sccs[0] began representing in 1972. I’m not used to catching `brlcad out at… anything, usually. Thought he might enjoy this “technically correct” (the best kind of correct) note. Not that the list isn’t impressive enough, and BRL-CAD impressive in its own right. And to think it started as a dare. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System
      - brlcad 4y ago
        Haha, yes, that is technically correct, and the best kind. I probably should have qualified with an ambiguous "modern version control" or simply said it predates "RCS" (1982). There's actually some indications BRL-CAD started in SCCS back around 1980, but any evidence of that is likely on old 10.5" magnetic data reel tapes that can't be read easily. So instead BRL-CAD's documented commit history spans from RCS import to CVS to SVN to Git.

74 points by aparks517 4y ago

Was gonna ask why not link the homepage instead but apparently the wiki is linked as About page from the project's homepage.

TakeBlaster16 4y ago
That's honestly not a bad idea in general. Wikipedia does a better job describing most software than the landing page typically does. That said, BRL-CAD seems to be an exception and describes itself very well in large text above the fold! 10/10

dkga 4y ago

Silly me thought this was something interesting about the Brazilian Real - Canadian Dollar exchange rate!

fcoury 4y ago
Came here to say this :-)
matheusmoreira 4y ago
I thought exactly the same thing!

digdugdirk 4y ago

As a Mechanical Engineer, I would absolutely love to see something like this (or Freecad/OpenSCAD/etc) step up to the "Blender level" to functionally compete against Solidworks. Its expensive, its buggy, and it requires a beast of a computer to function in any semi-respectable way. Does anyone have any experience in the software side of the industry to help explain why nothing open source is able to step up in a meaningful way?

gh02t 4y ago
CSG and CAD are just really hard to get right from scratch technically, with lots of math and edge cases and a massive number of features and optimizations you need to implement to hit minimum viability. Add to that the UI on top of the underlying geometry engine is inherently complicated and is a considerable software engineering problem in its own right. Plus the big players have so much momentum and offer free/nearly free (in terms of cost) options that are really slick and powerful e.g. Fusion360 or OnShape. Blender and KiCAD are examples of similar semi-niche professional tools that have been successful against similar barriers, but I still am not optimistic. Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm praying for, personally.
- PostOnce 4y ago
  Fusion360 keeps getting worse and worse, they revoke features and jack the price every few months. At some point open source becomes the better value, at least there you know features won't be stolen or the price increased without notice
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION TIMES if you dns block it…
    - Dracophoenix 4y ago
      Any alternatives you'd recommend?
      - buildbot 4y ago
        No, I have been looking extensively trying to find a decent option. Possibly Alibre through a VM? Solid edge is another possibility, still a subscription service though.
  - gh02t 4y ago

CmdrLoskene 4y ago

I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps we were using it for something it was not intended to do, or not the way it was meant to be used. I knew my way around the Pro/E interface and it was miles ahead of BRL-CAD. But even CADDS-IV was better than BRL-CAD. I can only speculate that being government-funded, the dev team for BRL-CAD had to make brutal decisions regarding when the feature set was "good enough," because they were working with a very limited budget tied to specific program goals. I don't know. I do know that using BRL-CAD was hellish back in the day.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
This comment would increase tremendously in value if you said something about which version of BRL-CAD you used.
- CmdrLoskene 4y ago
  Unfortunately I have forgotten the version. This was in the early 90s.
threatripper 4y ago
Did you have many different problems with BRL-CAD or was it connected to specific features? While I can't speak for BRL-CAD my experience with FreeCad which uses OpenCascade has been mixed. The chamfer/fillet tool there is just broken. If you use that and change some dimension it is likely to randomly crash. So, overall my experience has been ranging from rock solid to total trash depending on which features you use and what kind of models you create with it. The key question is "what do the developers use it for?" which should give you a hint for what kind of problem it is made.
- yetihehe 4y ago

justinsaccount 4y ago

I used this in 1999 or so when I had just started out using linux. It was a huge pain to get running. It was for US citizens only or something, and I had to have my parents write to the government requesting the decryption key for the installer. It may have required something crazy like a fax. After I got it running I had some trouble getting it to do things and wrote to the email address asking for example files. Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached.

rch 4y ago
> Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached. That's kind of awesome. I built it from source a few years after that and didn't have to deal with any headaches at all.
hulitu 4y ago
This is what kept me away from it. You won't have many users when you encrypt your files and the user has to request decription keys from .mil mail addresses.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stew-j 4y ago

Our company wrote C++ and Ruby wrappers around BRL-CAD a number of years ago for scripted CAD, here is the tutorial for the radio example: https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pdf https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pd... We used it for a few small projects. BRL-CAD also has Tcl scripting. We've currently switched to pure Common Lisp and F-rep modeling for scripted CAD. This is the old CL one (again wrapped C++) we are porting: https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero https://github.com/JMC-design/tovero

brlcad 4y ago
That radio tutorial conversion is awesome. Looks like the code is at http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/tovero/trunk/ http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/tovero/trunk/ ? That's some impressive work, particularly some of the advanced geometry entity mapping going on in there.
- stew-j 4y ago
  Thanks! That is the right repo. If you want to use it, I hold the copyright and we could relicense it. "My kingdom for a voice" [1] or maybe "My kingdom for a horse" [2] we did post an item about it on the BRL-CAD mailing list. The Common Lisp community didn't really notice Tovero 2.0 for Common Lisp either. I was actually thinking about trying a Common Lisp wrapper of BRL-CAD, or maybe doing a native CL port. [1] REM, Document, "King of Birds", 1987 (Anybody know a good marketer?) [2] Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5 Scene 4 (a Tovero is a type of horse)
  - brlcad 4y ago
    It looks like your e-mail was the victim of my paternity leave... it's still in my inbox. I do recall Dr. Rai commenting on your post, but didn't get a chance to explore it in any detail at the time. Remotely related, I've always thought a really fun lisp project would be to create an Emacs major mode for BRL-CAD. Either something to explore .g data (like tar mode) or an interactive editor like mged with lisp wrapping BRL-CAD's libged editing library.

sneak 4y ago

> The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC. Wow.

stew-j 4y ago
Another interesting fact: The BRL of BRL-CAD is the Ballistic Research Laboratory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Research_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Research_Laboratory which developed, along with the Penn, the first general-purpose digital computer ENIAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
- brlcad 4y ago
  Another fun fact, BRL-CAD was started by Mike Muuss, author of the 'ping' networking tool. Brilliant computer scientist. Also, while it's evolved, the codebase predates nearly everything .. ansi c, c++, tcp/ip, opengl, version control, .. actively developed and funded since 1979.
  - bch 4y ago
    > version control /me waves constructively, solidly at `brlcad Your list looks good until “version control”, for which at least sccs[0] began representing in 1972. I’m not used to catching `brlcad out at… anything, usually. Thought he might enjoy this “technically correct” (the best kind of correct) note. Not that the list isn’t impressive enough, and BRL-CAD impressive in its own right. And to think it started as a dare. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System
    - brlcad 4y ago
      Haha, yes, that is technically correct, and the best kind. I probably should have qualified with an ambiguous "modern version control" or simply said it predates "RCS" (1982). There's actually some indications BRL-CAD started in SCCS back around 1980, but any evidence of that is likely on old 10.5" magnetic data reel tapes that can't be read easily. So instead BRL-CAD's documented commit history spans from RCS import to CVS to SVN to Git.