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dcowden
cadquery
Python2014–2022
dcowden / cadquery · Archived

cadquery

CadQuery-- a parametric cad script framework

Science & EngineeringCAD & Manufacturing
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
7Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
436GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CadQuery-- a parametric cad script framework

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-10-30 20:31:33 UTC to 2022-02-07 04:52:19 UTC.

01232014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

10 sources
ur-whale·Feb 7, 2022
First comment on hackaday is "a one gig installer? no thank you". Exactly the first reason why I don't consider cadquery a viable tool (not the only one): conda is a monstrosity (even miniconda) that will irrevocably maim your system if you're crazy enough to install it. Another reason is this: selecting a subcomponent in a complex hierarchical model is basically a nightmare: https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery/issues/29
In CadQuery Comes of Age
ur-whale·Feb 6, 2022
Cut and paste of a recent comment I made in a similar thread: I've started to switch to Cadquery from OpenSCAD because OpenSCAD lacks proper fillets and chamfers. I usually prefer the CSG (arithmetic tree of union/difference/intersection + transforms + base shape leaves) to model 3D objects, as opposed to Cadquery's "draw on 2D surfaces and extrude" approach, but OpenSCAD's lack of fillets / chamfers combined with the "everything is a polygonal mesh" approach of the rendering engine is just too limiting. Cadquery has a lot of potential (the underlying engine uses a traditional hierarchical NURBS BREP, IIUC), but it also has a lot of shortcomings: Here are some I've bumped into: . very strange "stack-based" model. For complex objects, it's hard to wrap your head around it, and the workflow it forces on you as a user does not always fi
Read the rest
t your mental model of the object. . the underlying hierarchical nature of the object (the BREP) is forcibly hidden from the user, which leads to kafka-esque situations when one wants to e.g. select parts of an object. . selecting parts (faces and edges) in a object is a nightmare. cadquery has "selectors", which are a) its own weird little DSL b) very difficult to use on complex shapes c) does not support name-based retrieval: can't label things and get to them later by name. See this github issue for example: https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery/issues/29 - the UI (cq-editor) is unusable for real-world work: no perspective rendering, no graduations in ortho views, no way to measure things on the object, no way to examine the BREP, etc ... Generally speaking, the UI is only a visualizer, and does not let you query / inspect the model in any detailed way. - fine-grain control over tessellation (conversion to mesh) is lacking. - good for modeling mechanical parts / lousy for modeling anything organic-looking - importing external models that don't fit the cadquery BREP-based represention is basically impossible. TL;DR: a nice tool to add to your belt, but not a very mature environment yet, and certainly can't replace OpenSCAD yet.
In CadQuery –- A Python parametric CAD scripting framework based on OCCT
ur-whale·Oct 21, 2021
>I was under the impression that CadQuery sort of obsoletes OpenSCAD. I've started to switch to Cadquery from OpenSCAD because it lacks proper fillets and chamfers. I usually prefer the CSG (arithmetic tree of union/difference/intersection + transforms + base shape leaves) to model 3D objects, as opposed to Cadquery's "draw on 2D surfaces and extrude" approach, but OpenSCAD's lack of fillets / chamfers combined with the "everything is a polygonal mesh" approach of the rendering engine is just too limiting. Cadquery has a lot of potential (the underlying engine uses a traditional hierarchical NURBS BREP, IIUC), but it also has a lot of shortcomings: Here are some I've bumped into: . very strange "stack-based" model. For complex objects, it's hard to wrap your head around it, and the workflow it forces on you as a user does not always
Read the rest
fit your mental model of the object. . the underlying hierarchical nature of the object (the BREP) is forcibly hidden from the user, which leads to kafka-esque situations when one wants to e.g. select parts of an object. . selecting parts (faces and edges) in a object is a nightmare. cadquery has "selectors", which are a) its own weird little DSL b) very difficult to use on complex shapes c) does not support name-based retrieval: can't label things and get to them later by name. See this github issue for example: https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery/issues/29 - the UI (cq-editor) is unusable for real-world work: no perspective rendering, no graduations in ortho views, no way to measure things on the object, no way to examine the BREP, etc ... Generally speaking, the UI is only a visualizer, and does not let you query / inspect the model in any detailed way. - fine-grain control over tessellation (conversion to mesh) is lacking. - good for modeling mechanical parts / lousy for modeling anything organic-looking - importing external models that don't fit the cadquery BREP-based represention is basically impossible. TL;DR: a nice tool to add to your belt, but not a very mature environment yet, and certainly can't replace OpenSCAD yet.
In Getting the best out of OpenSCAD
robodan·May 19, 2018
I'd love to know how this works out for you. I was trying to do something similar, but got stuck. The core issue is that the fluent object design approach makes it very difficult to decompose objects into reusable features. The shared state behind the fluent approach makes creating multiple sub-objects (to then combining them) difficult (maybe impossible). The power of Python gets limited to thinking about only one thing at a time. See https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery/issues/167 They are trying to fix this in 2.0, but that's still in early development.
In CadQuery – a parametric CAD script framework
kanzure·Oct 30, 2014
I have looked at basically all available open-source CAD kernels, and verbnurbs is the absolute cleanest and most well written I have ever encountered. Verbnurbs beats the pants off OpenCASCADE, OpenNURBS, CGAL, BRL-CAD and a hundred others, any day of the week. Most existing implementations are huge and written by large teams that don't completely understand the entire system, and as a result they all end up bloated, poorly written and poorly maintained. It doesn't help that OpenCASCADE (for example) does not distribute the majority of their tests, making it hard for open source contributors to refactor or delete their code. Verbnurbs has been able to maintain trajectory all the way up to curve-curve intersections, and I am sure surface-surface is going to work pretty well. Here's what the competition looks like: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/ca
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d/opencascade As for the others complaining about usability, I would guess that something like https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery would be a suitable direction....
In Verb - A CAD Library for the Web

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