A CAD application from the future, brought to you by the [KittyCAD team](https://kittycad.io).
The KittyCAD modeling app is our take on what a modern modelling experience can be. It is applying several lessons learned in the decades since most major CAD tools came into existence:
- All artifacts—including parts and assemblies—should be represented as human-readable code. At the end of the day, your CAD project should be "plain text"
- This makes version control—which is a solved problem in software engineering—trivial for CAD
- All GUI (or point-and-click) interactions should be actions performed on this code representation under the hood
- This unlocks a hybrid approach to modeling. Whether you point-and-click as you always have or you write your own KCL code, you are performing the same action in KittyCAD Modeling App
- Everything graphics _has_ to be built for the GPU
- Most CAD applications have had to retrofit support for GPUs, but our geometry engine is made for GPUs (primarily Nvidia's Vulkan), getting the order of magnitude rendering performance boost with it
- Make the resource-intensive pieces of an application auto-scaling
- One of the bottlenecks of today's hardware design tools is that they all rely on the local machine's resources to do the hardest parts, which include geometry rendering and analysis. Our geometry engine parallelizes rendering and just sends video frames back to the app (seriously, inspect source, it's just a `<video>` element), and our API will offload analysis as we build it in
We are excited about what a small team of people could build in a short time with our API. We welcome you to try our API, build your own applications, or contribute to ours!
KittyCAD Modeling App is a _hybrid_ user interface for CAD modeling. You can point-and-click to design parts (and soon assemblies), but everything you make is really just [`kcl` code](https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-experiments) under the hood. All of your CAD models can be checked into source control such as GitHub and responsibly versioned, rolled back, and more.
The 3D view in KittyCAD Modeling App is just a video stream from our hosted geometry engine. The app sends new modeling commands to the engine via WebSockets, which returns back video frames of the view within the engine.
We recommend downloading the latest application binary from [our Releases page](https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/releases). If you don't see your platform or architecture supported there, please file an issue.
First, [install Rust via `rustup`](https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install). This project uses a lot of Rust compiled to [WASM](https://webassembly.org/) within it. Then, run:
First, start the dev server following "Running a development build" above.
Then in another terminal tab, run:
```
yarn test
```
Which will run our suite of [Vitest unit](https://vitest.dev/) and [React Testing Library E2E](https://testing-library.com/docs/react-testing-library/intro/) tests, in interactive mode by default.
Will spin up the web app before opening up the tauri dev desktop app. Note that it's probably a good idea to close the browser tab that gets opened since at the time of writting they can conflict.
The dev instance automatically opens up the browser devtools which can be disabled by [commenting it out](https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/blob/main/src-tauri/src/main.rs#L92.)
To build, run `yarn tauri build`, or `yarn tauri build --debug` to keep access to the devtools.
Note that these became separate apps on Macos, so make sure you open the right one after a build 😉
The PR may serve as a place to discuss the human-readable changelog and extra QA. A quick way of getting PR's merged since the last bump is to [use this PR filter](https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/pulls?q=is%3Apr+sort%3Aupdated-desc+is%3Amerged+), open up the browser console and past in the following