New Maintainer Introduction, MacOS support dropped, High-Level Roadmap

[3DLirious]

Happy New Year to the Curv community! It is a new year for Curv as well. I wanted to announce that I have taken over maintenance and development of Curv. Doug is still around, offering helpful advice and insight (and even the occasional bug fix), but is not planning on working on Curv further.

A little about me: my interests are mainly in 3D printing and Design for AM (DfAM), and I'm especially fond of lattices. I am a Mechanical Engineer with a Masters in Additive Manufacturing and Design, so I'm coming at Curv with research, technical, and functional (CAD) use cases in mind. However, I am also an art lover, especially full colour 3D printed art (shout-out to George Hart and Nick Ervinck) and want Curv to remain strong for artistic and creative uses as well.

Another significant announcement is that MacOS support has officially been dropped. This has been true for some time (ever since Doug's Mac laptop died in 2020) as there's been no one to test changes on MacOS, but now it's official. If you would like to try to run Curv on MacOS please see issue #272  for ideas. One major advantage of this change is that MacOS's OpenGL limitations will no longer hold Curv back, and we are free to use more advanced OpenGL features (such as compute shaders).

In the short(ish) term, the plan is to finish up some small features that are in-work and document everything (see the TODO) then release version 0.6 sometime this year (hopefully in the first half of the year, but we'll see). There have been quite a number of changes and improvements since the last release, so if you haven't checked out Curv in a while then you really ought to (see the Current Status for a partial list of new features).

Longer term (after the 0.6 release) the plan is to add more advanced OpenGL features and underlying enhancements, hopefully addressing some of the long standing limitations of Curv, such as support for large unions. There will also be more improvements to libraries, documentation and the website. No major rewrites are currently planned, instead expect more incremental and evolutionary improvements over time.

Looking forward to making Curv better and better!

Tim Ayres @3DLirious

[Lee]

Woo! Been following your developments on the Matrix channel time to time. Too bad to hear about Doug but I guess interests have shifted. I would love to see large unions as the top priority. It opens a lot of new design space, which is what I'm most interested in. My largest issue with Curv is speed (despite already being quite fast). We need ridiculous speed! Will check out the latest developments sometime.

Keep up the awesome work!

Lee

[3DLirious]

Thank you Lee! I appreciate your kind words.

> I would love to see large unions as the top priority.

Well, I have a few other things on the TODO list before I tackle that, including writing lots of documentation. As I'm sure you know, documentation can take longer to write than code, and is less fun, but is important. I also have some research to do before I can tackle the performance issues, as I've never written a compiler, partial evaluator or compute shader before (and am still learning C++ ;), but it all sounds like lots of fun!

Tim

[Giampiero Gabbiani]

Happy to see the project still alive and well! I look forward for new documentation ... I found the project very interesting since the very beginning, but rather difficult to follow for people like me coming from OpenSCAD.

Best wishes

Giampiero 

[3DLirious]

Hi Giampiero,

Thank you for your kind words!

Have you checked out the documentation recently? I've made a lot of improvements in the last two years, for example all of the shapes and operators now have pictures and examples (plus there are more of them). There is also the Cheat Sheet, which I refer to on an almost daily basis! It might look rather familiar, as I based it off of the OpenSCAD cheat sheet. What I found very helpful to learn was to read and play around with the many examples, and to read through std.curv. One of the things I love about Curv is that the standard library is written in Curv itself!

There's still several libraries that I'm behind on documenting, and things can always be improved of course, but the core is pretty well documented by now I think. I plan on loading the docs to readthedocs sometime this year (not sure if it will be before or after the 0.6 release), which should help with discoverability.

I'm an OpenSCAD user myself (although much less these days). In some ways Curv is quite similar to OpenSCAD (it started off life as OpenSCAD2 after all), but in other ways it is very different. It was my first experience with functional programming, which was a change. But if you have any questions or run into problems, you can ask here or in the Matrix or Discord chat rooms.

Best,

Tim