Fornjot

It's been another productive week of Fornjot development! On a high level, my priority right now is to implement constructive solid geometry (CSG) operations. This requires a lot of refactoring and clean-up first, and I keep finding myself in this recursive mode of having to first tackle another clean-up, before I can wrap up the current one. A requires B, requires C, required D, ...usually I'm finding myself 5 layers down that chain before I hit on something that I can actually implement right now.

This is slow-going work, but it's also very satisfying. Every little clean-up I merge, makes the CAD kernel a bit more robust, and better able to handle future requirements. I just need to keep taking these steps, until all the hurdles are out of the way, and I can implement the CSG algorithms themselves.

In other news, new contributor Hendrik Maus did some great work improving the build infrastructure!

Sponsors

Fornjot is supported by @lthiery, @Yatekii, 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.

Improvements and fixes

• Add missing space to error message (#144)
• Re-enable logging (#148)
• Fix handling of duplicate points in approximation (#158)

Documentation

• Update README (#162)

Internal improvements

• Update dependencies (#135, #136, #137, #142)
• Make some minor clean-ups (#147, #160, #165, #169, #172, #177)
• Add approximation test suite (#149, #150, #159, #167)
• Add infrastructure to make vertices less error-prone (#161, #166)
• Clean up Circle code (#163, #164)
• Add bounding vertices to Edge (#168)
• Make edge approximation more robust (#170)
• Change Line to point-vector form (#174)
• Provide pre-compiled binaries for each build of main branch (#175, #179; special thanks to first-time contributor Hendrik Maus)

Website

• Add Weekly Dev Log (#20, #28)
• Simplify footer (#21)
• Refer to newsletter in blog posts (#22)
• Make some tweaks to the design (#23, #24)
• Improve <aside>s on top of blog posts (#25)
• Cross-post article from my website (#26)
• Generate Atom feed (#27)
• Improve title (#29)
• Add Sponsor page (#30)

Outlook

I managed to finish a lot of clean-ups last week, the big-ticket item being #138. The goal remains to address #97, but I'm aware of a few more clean-ups I need to make before I can tackle this directly. As mentioned above, the last operation that needs to be updated for #97 is the sweep operation, and to do that, I need to add support sweeping curves into surfaces, which is up next. After that, I'm foreseeing the need to make the triangulation code a bit more flexible.

No idea how far I'll get until the next Weekly Dev Log rolls around.