I have been a bit unsatisfied with OpenSCAD for a few reasons, lately:
- filleting is a pain, but this is partly mitigated by the Round-Anything library which I’ve been putting to use in the last few days.
- Measuring within the GUI isn’t provided for, so if you want to measure, you have to come up with some ad-hoc measure sticks other other tools to “union” into the drawing.
After searching around a bit, I stumbled into ImplicitCAD (implicitcad.org), whose language called extopenscad is similar to Openscad, but with some important differences that make it almost backward compatible but not for any model that’s relatively complex.
The big advantage to extopenscad is that it handles rounding in the union and intersection operators natively. You just need to specify a single radius and it will automatically fillet the joints. Another advantage is that it’s written in Haskell underneath the covers, and apparently has a much better geometry engine underneath than OpenSCAD which uses CGAL, I think.
That said, when I tried the language in their online demo, I found that the syntax error checking was completely useless, in that error description, line, and character don’t correctly describe the error, and point to the wrong line and character as the one that caused the problem.
I haven’t tried installing the extopenscad compiler on my machine to see if it’s any better at error checking than the online one.
I thought maybe if people here have tried it and gave up, you could save me some time. Otherwise, if I don’t hear from anyone, I will give it a whirl over the next week or so.