µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D

If you import, sew, check geometry, refine, etc., you can eliminate unnecessary triangles in planar faces. But you can't magically make a 120-sided-polygon that should be a circle a circle; you're going to have to do that yourself.

Though Mark Ganson's MeshRemodel workbench looks interesting: https://github.com/mwganson/MeshRemodel

And FreeCAD is not the best tool for correcting broken meshes, which are commonplace. MeshLab and the vaguely-on-life-support AutoCAD MeshMixer are better at it.

STEP/IGES is as you say more or less essential if you want to work with code-CAD output in any other serious context. STL is not enough: it is like converting to JPEG in the middle of a photo editing flow, not at the end. It destroys information — in this case geometry.

You might find DeclaraCAD interesting.

OpenSCAD in a FreeCAD context does address many of the limitations of OpenSCAD, but it's not perfectly compatible.

Lots changed since 2020 in the current 1.0.2 release, including TNP mitigations and the core assembly workbench.

The 1.1 developer release (which is stable and useful and getting quite close to final release) contains further TNP mitigations; further improvements to the core assembly workbench; radically better lighting; datums have moved into the core; there's a way of enabling the advanced attachment mode in Part Design; compound body support in Part Design by default; significant comfort improvements in Sketcher, transparent previews, dragger gadgets and improved pattern tools in Part Design; support for external intersection geometry, Qt6 GUI improvements; lots of improvements to the Preferences panels, and that's before looking at FEM, BIM and CAM.

Oh and the Ondsel stuff — the web sharing service, its plugin and its headless worker support — is also under the control of the FreeCAD project, free of its AWS dependencies and being actively maintained.

It's still idiosyncratic but it goes way, way beyond looks. There was a big hump to get over between 0.21 and 1.0, re-engineering RealThunder's TNP mitigations to be more practical and adding the core Assembly workbench, but there's been enormous progress since.

HN's negativity around FreeCAD no longer astonishes me because I think HNers in general have a rather misbegotten sense of what GUI CAD even is, what its strengths are instead of just its weaknesses, and how much of a challenge something with FreeCAD's scope really is. I mean Dune3D is interesting but frustrating still, SALOME is interesting but has huge money behind it; FreeCAD is the sort of hard-won, low-governance, pure-open-source-no-corporate-bullshit project HNers should prefer. Is it the equal of commercial CAD packages? No it's not. It's a different beast and an absolute social good.

I recently happened upon a video which mostly changed my mind [0], in which someone successfully passed a Solidworks professional certification using FreeCAD. And to my eyes, their workflow was only rarely any worse than e.g. Fusion360, Solidworks, etc.

I've since been trialling FreeCAd via the 'bleeding edge' weekly development builds [1]... and it's not perfect, and it's a touch clunky in certain areas, but it's now more than usable. (In some areas, it's actually better than the competition I've tried, IMO - for example making and cutting threads.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8 [1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases

Still, questionable if it was intentional .. and if it was, does not necesarrily mean they are Nazis (they did not invent, but just used the old symbol).

Also this project was funded in part by the german Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space and they are not known to fund open Nazis in general.