cad/tessellation.py walks every node and every triangle of every face in Python — three interpreter loops per face — to turn OCCT's mesh into flat arrays the kernel already holds. extract_meshes hands them over in one call with the GIL released; extract_edge_polylines does the same for the per-edge GCPnts discretisation behind the viewport's edge overlay. The output reproduces the Python loops exactly, including the parts that look like quirks: unmeshed faces are omitted so face_index keeps its gaps (it is the app-wide face identity, not a list position), triangles are rewound and normals negated for reversed faces, and nodes come back float64 — the binary transport narrows to float32 on its way out but the JSON one does not, so narrowing here would quietly change what the REST payload says. Plain dicts of arrays rather than a bound class, because the cad pool sends meshes across a pipe and dicts of ndarrays pickle natively. There is a test for that, and one asserting the arrays outlive the shape. The equality tests re-implement the Python loops in full and compare with array_equal, not approx: a difference here moves what the viewport draws or what a face pick resolves to. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DfriM8XUkn7uYf5Dwe2xo6
n3xd-ocp
Hand-written nanobind bindings for the
OpenCASCADE (OCCT) geometry kernel, covering exactly the surface the N3XD CAD
backend uses — 139 symbols across 48 OCP.* modules, not all of OCCT.
The package installs as a top-level OCP, so it is a drop-in replacement for
cadquery-ocp-novtk and the app's 442 import sites stay untouched.
Status: Inc 0 (spike) shipped — build system, OCCT builder image, handle
model, and the first module surface (gp, TopAbs, TopoDS, TopExp,
TopLoc, TopTools, BRep, BinTools, Poly, Standard), published as
7.9.3.1.dev1. BREP serialisation is byte-identical to the stock wheel, which
is the gate that mattered: the pools and the content-addressed derive payloads
both depend on it. Coverage is 34 of the 139 symbols the app imports; the rest
lands in increments 1-4 (roadmap 10C).
Start with docs/design.md for the decisions,
docs/building.md to build one, and
docs/adding-symbols.md to extend the surface. The
phase plan lives in the app repo at docs-private/reference/roadmap.md
(Phase 10).
Why
cadquery-ocp lags OCCT (it wraps 7.9.3; OCCT 8.0 shipped 2026-05), builds
Windows and macOS wheels we never use, and until recently forced a 638 MB VTK
dependency into the image. Binding call overhead is not a bottleneck — the
CAD hotspots live inside the C++ kernel — so this exists for version velocity,
footprint, and two defects that a binding we control prevents by construction:
- OCCT sub-shapes are returned by value, so a wrapper can never alias a
TShapewhose owner has died (this segfaulted a process-global face memo). - Executing constructors (the two-argument
BRepAlgoAPI_*forms) are not bound, so the double-execution footgun is unrepresentable.
It also releases the GIL around kernel calls and ships type stubs, neither of which upstream does.
Build
OCCT is compiled once into a builder image and reused; it is never built on the production host (4 cores, and a kernel build is multi-hour). Wheels are built here on a dev box and published to the Gitea package registry.
make image # once, ~40 min: compiles OCCT 7.9.3 into the builder image
make dev # inner loop: incremental compile + tests
make wheel # compile, stubs, auditwheel, self-containment smoke test
make publish # -> https://git.stroblme.de/api/packages/N3XD/pypi
Credentials go in .secrets (gitignored) as UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME /
UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD. Consumers read anonymously — the package is public:
uv pip install --index-url https://git.stroblme.de/api/packages/N3XD/pypi/simple/ \
--prerelease=allow n3xd-ocp
Versions are <occt-version>.N, enforced at configure time against the OCCT
actually found, so the kernel a wheel wraps is readable from its version alone.
The registry refuses to republish a version; iteration builds therefore carry a
.devN suffix and are the only ones the registry's cleanup rule collects.