FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript
Hello HN users, This is a CAD by code project I have been working on on my free time for more than year now. I built it with 3 goals in mind: - It should be familiar to CAD designers who have used other programs. Same workflow, same terminology. - Reduce the mental effort required to create models as much as possible. This is achieved by: - Provide live rendering and visual guidance as you type. - Allow the user to reference existing edges/faces on the scene instead of having to calculate everything. - Provide interactive mouse helpers for features that are hard to write by code: Only 3…
In plain words
FluidCAD is a parametric CAD tool that lets users create 3D models using JavaScript code. Designed for engineers and designers familiar with traditional CAD workflows, it aims to reduce complexity through live rendering, visual guidance while typing, and the ability to reference existing geometry rather than calculating dimensions manually. Interactive mouse helpers assist with difficult operations like edge trimming and curve drawing, while sensible defaults and automatic object fusion minimize manual configuration.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN users, This is a CAD by code project I have been working on on my free time for more than year now. I built it with 3 goals in mind: - It should be familiar to CAD designers who have used other programs. Same workflow, same terminology. - Reduce the mental effort required to create models as much as possible. This is achieved by: - Provide live rendering and visual guidance as you type. - Allow the user to reference existing edges/faces on the scene instead of having to calculate everything. - Provide interactive mouse helpers for features that are hard to write by code: Only 3 interactive modes for now: Edge trimming, Sketch region extrude, Bezier curve drawing. - Implicit coding whenever possible: e.g: There are sensible defaults for most parameters. The program will automatically fuse intersecting objects together so you do not have to worry about what object needs to be fused with what. - It should be reasonably fast: The scene objects are cached and only the updated objects are re-computed. I think I have achieved these goals to a good extent. The program is still in early stages and there are many features I want to add, rewrite but I think it is already usable for simple models. Update to add more details: This is based on Opencascade.js WASM binding. So you get all the good things that come with any brep kernel. Fillets, chamfers, step import and export... The scene is webview but the editing is in your local file. You use your own editor and the environment you are familiar with. One important feature that I think make this stand out among other code based cad software is the ability to transform features not just shapes. More here: https://fluidcad.io/docs/guides/patterns You can see it in action in the lantern example: https://fluidcad.io/docs/tutorials/lantern
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