Fornjot

A few weeks ago, I fell down a rabbit hole of kernel cleanups, and I'm starting to climb back up. Doing cleanups can cause me this nagging feeling that I'm indulging myself; that I should find some hack to work around the problem at hand, so I can continue doing what's actually important. But a) stacking hacks on top of each other soon causes more problems than it solves; and b) when those cleanups pay off, that is so sweet.

And last weeks, those cleanups paid off! I managed to simplify lots of kernel code and many issues are now closed (#97, #250, #695, #1020). Some of them very longstanding ones! This not only clears the way for continuing the implementation of the union operation, it will make all work easier going forward.

Sponsors

Fornjot is supported by @webtrax-oz, @lthiery, @Yatekii, @martindederer, @hobofan, @ahdinosaur, @thawkins, @bollian, @rozgo, @reivilibre, and my other awesome sponsors. Thank you!

End-user improvements

Improvements to Fornjot and its documentation that are visible to end-users.

None this week; busy improving the kernel!

Ecosystem improvements

Improvements to the Fornjot ecosystem that are relevant to developers who are building on top of Fornjot components.

fj-kernel

• Improve sweep algorithm (#1038, #1054, #1061, #1063, #1068)
• Add SurfaceVertex (#1048)
• Produce better approximations, validate their correctness (#1049, #1053, #1056, #1058)
• Make triangulation more flexible (#1050)
• Add Faces (#1051)
• Simplify Edge; perform cleanups this enables (#1055, #1057, #1059, #1062)
• Rename Edge to HalfEdge (#1064)
• Define face orientation by the winding of its exterior cycle (#1066)
• Add API for finding faces (#1067)

fj-math

• Add Vector<2>::cross (#1065)

fj-operations

• Make use of Faces (#1052)
• Remove unused parameter of Shape::compute_brep (#1060)

Internal Improvements

Improvements that are relevant to developers working on Fornjot itself.

• Update release procedure (#1037)
• Update dependencies (#1039, #1040, #1041, #1042, #1043, #1044, #1045, #1047)
• Expand release automation (#1046)

Issue of the Week

Fornjot is still an early-stage project. Many things don't work very well yet, and that can lead to a rough user experience in some places. One such problem is how the GUI is coupled to the loaded model.

The GUI assumes that a model is always loaded. If a model can't be loaded when you start the Fornjot app, due to some error in the model, the GUI won't show at all. This is extremely confusing!

If you're interested in digging into Fornjot's graphics and UI code, to make an improvement that will have a big impact on Fornjot's usability, check out #1015 - GUI should start immediately, without waiting for model to be loaded.

Outlook

With all those cleanups finished, I should finally be in a position to address the issue that has been blocking the work on the union operation (#993). I expect that to be pretty easy now, but when I started looking into it on Friday (I only had a few minutes left), making the necessary changes caused a lot of test failures.

Hopefully this is going to be straight-forward. We'll see.