I thought we should make a little update on what we are doing.
After months of development, LibreCAD v2 is ready for a 2.0.8 release in next days, while our developers are still busy to get version 2.1.0 ready.
What’s new in LibreCAD 2.1.0 are some new GUI interface and most notably fixes for icons on HD displays like Macbook retina, in addition to all fixes and enhancement found in 2.0.8. This is a lot of work and we are still with limited resources! (Software developers, see this as a call for help!) We are still working on the 2.1.0 release but with a little luck this should happen soon, within weeks if we are lucky.
The crashes in our build server was properly caused by a overheating mac mini and we are working on getting that replaced by a new mini for our automated builds. For the moment we do build OS/X by hand but the windows build’s are now automated using a proper build server. All thank’s to everybody that has been supporting LibreCAD financially and with kind words and help.
LibreCAD 3 is at the moment on hold but I will call out for help later this year once we are ready again to work on it. We need strong c++ developers with at least some knowledge of c++11 and people that can design and work with API’s. LibreCAD 3 is a lot about being able to integrate into other applications and to build stand-alone tools around the libraries. While LibreCAD v2 is more of a monolith, LibreCAD v3 will be divided into a set of libraries. For sure we will build a UI around it, but we will also have the option to make a scriptable version of it’s core engine. One of our development goal is to design a 2D engine to be used in 3D CAD, such as FreeCAD and BRL-CAD. Another interesting development is Web based LibreCAD by addition of an HTML5 canvas drawing engine. With an ambitious development plan, we are calling for developers interested in 2D CAD, computational geometry, C++, experienced with API designing and being not shy of a bit of refactoring a code base once a while.
As always, many thank’s for your support and we are looking forward for information, idea’s and just a ‘thanks!’ on our #librecad IRC channel at freenode.
Team LibreCAD
Hello,
the integration into other CAD programs sounds very interesting. However, as I understand it, BRL-CAD and FreeCAD are both licensed under LGPLv2. While in theory it is possible to add GPL v2 code to this systems, it would effectivly mean a license change for those projects which I doubt they will do (I know it for FreeCAD, they got to great lengths to eliminate GPL code). What are the ideas for this problem?
Regards,
Ickby
Ickby,
The idea is that LibreCAD 3 will have a different license that would allow such code inclusions. We currently opted for using modified BSD 3. LibreCAD V3 will also be a complete re-write from the ground up so we don’t have to worry about GPLv2 legacy.
I would love to here everybody’s though about that and what would benefit LibreCAD community best, eg, what way can we get most coders/projects and increase growth while the project stay’s open source for everybody to use.
Wow, exciting news! There would be a lot of possibilities from such an integration of LibreCAD and FreeCAD. It could really combine the strengths of both apps and compensate for each others weaknesses.
I’ll have a better look at the current v3 code already… This is thrilling, and indeed might open many new horizons. Specially in the field of architecture and construction, there is currently a big gap between the ideal (everybody would work with BIM) and the reality (mostly 2D-based workflows). This might be an excellent path to unite both ends somehow… I’d be interested in discussing that further!
Yorik,
you know where to find use! And we are also open for any discussion. During LibreCAD v3 development I try to guess what would be interested for you guys (and folks of BRL-CAD) to have and tried to find some middle ground between API style, speed of development and integration.
My current though now goes into making a API so FreeCAD can use the drawing engine of LibreCAD such that you can create entities in LibreCAD and beable to export/import files select entities etc..
you will be using c++11 in v2.1.0 and not c++14?
At this moment it’s set to compile with c++11.
In your wording, should we enable c++14 and what would the advantage be?
We will need to drop Qt 4 support before moving to C++14.
I’m thinking this will be a goal for 2.2.0.
https://woboq.com/blog/cpp14-in-qt.html
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