On 2009-02-03, Pete C. wrote:

Stuart Wheaton wrote:

cavelamb wrote:
Ignoramus14358 wrote:

BRLCAD is completely free software.

BRLCAD also completely sucks.

But that's just my humble opinion.

So, Richard, what exactly about it sucks?

Just curious,

Stuart

I expect that like most things Linux, it is inconsistent, poorly
documented, minimally supported, and probably rather amateurish in many
ways.

Actually -- it was developed by the U.S. Army Balistics Research
Lab (the "BRL" of "BRLCAD"), and it was tailored for what *they* needed
it to do. It may be very good for their tasks, and a bit awkward for
the HSM. Think of it as being like using a drawing program aimed at
architectural work (.e.g. dimensions in feet and inches) and trying to
use it to design a wris****ch. :-) And one developed for architectural
work would probably not have good features for doing circles and
fillets.

They used it on more industrial unix boxen -- Suns, SGIs and the
like back when they were developing it, not on linux. And in those days
you had to register to download the source. The place where I worked
(U.S. Army Night Vision Labs) used it for some things -- but not in the
branch where I was working, so I don't have personal experience with it.

Since it was developed using taxpayer money, and it has no truly
classified parts, it pretty much had to be released free eventually,
just like EMC (which was developed by the NIST).

Enjoy,
DoN.

P.S. I probably won't see just what cavelamb does not like about
it as I killfiled him some time ago as contributing too much
to the political spam and such and not enough to the
metalworking part of things.

IRRC -- he goes in cycles, but I decided that the good side of
the cycles was not good enough to put up with the bad side. :-)

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