Weekly Dev Log - 2022-W08

Weekly Dev Log - 2022-W08

Posted on 2022-02-28 by Hanno Braun

Fornjot is an early-stage project to create a next-generation Code-CAD application. This is Fornjot's Weekly Dev Log, a summary of the previous week's development activities.

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It's been another productive week of cleanups! I continue working towards addressing #97, although I've been forced to take a bit of a detour through #176 and #242. Sometimes I worry that this lack of user-visible changes over the last few weeks looks, from the outside, as if Fornjot isn't making any real progress. But I can assure you, this is not true!

All those cleanups happen in response to problems that I encounter while working towards supporting constructive solid geometry (CSG) operations. And every problem forces me to come up with a solution that makes the CAD kernel a bit more flexible, robust, and better able to handle future challenges.

This is necessary work, and I'm really excited about the progress I'm making. I hope you are too!

Sponsors

Fornjot is supported by @webtrax-oz, @lthiery, @Yatekii, @martindederer, and my other awesome sponsors. Thank you!

If you're interested in helping to make the project sustainable long-term, please consider supporting me too.

User-visible improvements

• Update README (#222, #234)

Internal improvements

• Update dependencies (#224, #225, #226, #227)
• Clean up Vertex (#228, #231, #236, #255)
• Make some cleanups in topology code (#229, #244)
• Fix some Clippy warnings (#232; thanks to @therealprof!)
• Add Bacon configuration file (#233; thanks to @hendrikmaus!)
• Clean up some things in math module (#235, #237, #243, #252)
• Validate Segment and Triangle on construction (#238, #239, #245, #249, #251; thanks to @therealprof!)
• Clean up approximation code (#245, #247)
• Make sweep operation slightly more correct (#248)
• Simplify creation of boundary representation (#254)
• Add new algorithms module (#256)
• Fix continuous deployment workflow (#257; thanks to @hendrikmaus!)

Issue of the week

If you're interested in getting involved with Fornjot but aren't sure where to start, why not look into issue #9 - Make --model parameter of host application more flexible?

Fornjot tries to load models from a models/ directory, which is convenient for development, because we have such a directory in the repository. But it's one of those things that make Fornjot inconvenient, if someone tries to use Fornjot outside of the repository.

This issue is a small step towards making Fornjot more usable, while also being relatively small and self-contained, making it a good first issue for new Fornjot contributors.

Outlook

As I alluded to above, I'm currently on a bit of a detour on my way to fixing #97. I've already started working towards #242, which I hope to wrap up quickly. After that, I'll be in a good position to clean up, and write a test suite for, the sweep operation. This should put #97 into reach, as the sweep operation is the last piece of code that still resists that change.

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