Comment by YuechenLi
7 hours ago
Wow, I'm glad I'm not the only person insane enough to make a geometric modeling kernel solo with LLMs. Did a quick review of the architecture, it's probably the strongest conventional kernel that's currently open source, much more advanced than Truck or SolidCore/SMLib currently.
(I'd like to think my own kernel is little bit ahead of you architecturally though.)
How's the Boolean and fillet/chamfer robustness currently in Popkern?
Also, would you like to collaborate and compare notes? It's a lot of work trying to maintain something like this solo.
Hey! Nice to meet you.
I checked out Aetheris a while back. Congrats! These projects are tough to keep slogging on with.
To be fair, solidcore/SMLib are more mature in some ways than popkern. SMLib uses non-manifold topology for booleans, which popkern is actively working on now, and it has years of real-world use behind it, a level of hardening popkern is still working towards. solidcore builds on that as a Rust port.
On robustness, booleans, fillets, and chamfers are general in popkern, and they work well on a lot of parts, but there are known weak spots. Dense hole arrangements, near-tangent curved contacts, and fillets running into other fillets at awkward corners can still fail. My real-part test corpus is smaller than I'd like too. There are 40+ years of publications to reimplement, and that's a big part of how I'm closing the gaps.
Definitely open to collaborating. Your AP242/PMI and import-qualification work is well ahead of mine, and a shared corpus of hard parts we both run could be useful for both of us. My project socials are on popkern.dev, feel free to reach out!