Hacker News: ruevs

New comment by ruevs in "SolveSpace (open source 2D/3D CAD) working on Windows 2000 (2025)"

ruevs — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:12:24 +0000

Someone at Microsoft thinks the same ;-)

If you have Windows 11 it comes with this new (open source) `edit` written in Rust - open a command prompt and type `edit`.

This is somewhat amusing, considering all the bloat that it comes with otherwise. Even `notepad` has become rather... feature full... it has tabs, spell checking and AI...

New comment by ruevs in "SolveSpace (open source 2D/3D CAD) working on Windows 2000 (2025)"

ruevs — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:50:26 +0000

I wondered the same and actually tried it on Windows 95 - it will be a bit more work. The bottom screen shots in this comment https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco... are the missing APIs on Win95...

I expect the build for Windows 2000 may work on NT 4.0, because it has OpenGL, but Windows 3.11 with Win32s will never work - because it does not have OpenGL(I think...).

And Unicode will also be a problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_in_Microsoft_Windows

SolveSpace (open source 2D/3D CAD) working on Windows 2000 (2025)

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:32:04 +0000

SolveSpace just became "officially" available for the Web (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586614), it is also officially supported on Windows (Vista-11), Linux and macOS.

However with a little effort it also compiles for and runs on Windows 2000. Here it is:

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco...

So it runs on all the majour platforms from the last 26 years (excluding MacOS 9).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607394

Points: 40

# Comments: 6

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:16:41 +0000

By the way this creation of his, from July 1990: https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/ is very relevant here, but we are getting off-topic :-)

SpeakFreely was his as well - a very early encrypted, VoIP app.

And this: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ ... As I said - an interesting person :-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:05:06 +0000

One more fun fact:

SolveSpace officially is supported on Windows (Vista-11), Linux and macOS, and compiles with Emscripten and runs in a browser.

However with a little effort it also compiles for and runs on Windows 2000.

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco...

So it runs on all the majour platforms from the last 26 years (excluding MacOS 9).

New comment by ruevs in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:53:57 +0000

And 6-7 years later the `WinSxS` directory was born and these days it is tens of gigabytes.

`Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase`

In an administrator command prompt. You can thank me when it's finished ;-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:44:26 +0000

One more fun fact:

SolveSpace officially is supported on Windows (Vista-11), Linux and macOS, and compiles with Emscripten and runs in a browser.

However with a little effort it also compiles for and runs on Windows 2000.

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco...

So it runs on all the majour platforms from the last 26 years (excluding MacOS 9).

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:58:07 +0000

Is this critique or praise of his character? ;-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:53:57 +0000

Join SolveSpace development? ;-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 03:06:30 +0000

GNU Unifont is 973KiB, and we also have the vector font unicode.lff.gz at 1.03MB.

So the web version of SolveSpace is literally one megabyte of WebAssembly.

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:32:53 +0000

But does it run etirely locally in the browser after downloading a total of 2993991 bytes (less than 3 megabytes) of code? ;-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:29:35 +0000

Had to Google this one :-)

Since SolveSpace has a helix tool that can "extrude" any sketch along a helix it should be doable.

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:21:03 +0000

Oh! This is very bad! It should not look like this.

I've tried Firefox, Chrome and Edge on Windows; Firefox and Chrome an Android phone and tablet and it renders correctly - like the desktop version.

What browser are you using? On what OS? Perhaps the web page is zoomed in/out in the browser? Scaling options in the browser? HiDPI screen with scaling?

Would you be willing to open an issue on GitHub with the details? Or just post them here.

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:06:21 +0000

The last Autodesk software I've used was AutoCAD 2000 (released in 1999). And I've not followed them since.

Perhaps they have indeed become "one of the worst corp. in the world of software", but in the early years they were very interesting. The founder of Autodesk, John Walker (he died in 2024) wrote/edited and interesting book on the early years: "The Autodesk File" https://fourmilab.ch/autofile/

New comment by ruevs in "Build123d: A Python CAD programming library"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:22:47 +0000

Had to Google this one :-)

Since SolveSpace has a helix tool that can "extrude" any sketch along a helix it should be doable.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dreaded-double-helix-tutorial...

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:15:56 +0000

If you get lost press `f` to "fit" the current drawing to the screen.

By the way working in SolveSpace is extremely fast if you use keyboard shortcuts - almost everything can be dome with a shortcut key. No need to search for them - you can learn them by looking in the menus.

A very short "crash course" on the navigation is in the "Quick start:" section at the bottom of the download page. https://solvespace.com/download.pl The "demo video" on the home page is also a great starting point.

After that the "Tutorials" and "Reference" go in as much detail as one may want :-)

New comment by ruevs in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

ruevs — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:06:55 +0000

Intentional indeed. It is GNU Unifont - a 973KiB file that covers practically all of Unicode. In a bitmap font, platform independent, self contained, small. Practically all that SolveSpace strives to be.

https://www.unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html

Perhaps I've been using computers for too long but I actually like the non anti-aliased "sharp" and "pixely" look :-)

New comment by ruevs in "Show HN: Chili3d – A open-source, browser-based 3D CAD application"

ruevs — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 06:47:38 +0000

The other "decent" commercial one that can be licensed is C3D (ASCON/АСКОН uses a CAD kernel based on it in КОМПАС 3D) but it is Russian and thus currently "behind sanctions".

Here is a bit on it from the author of Plasticity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvwiH1DOK1M it initially was based on C3D.

New comment by ruevs in "On CAD"

ruevs — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 01:29:13 +0000

The comparison is pretty interesting, however SolveSpace is badly misrepresented by "not parametric". In my opinion easy, stable and very flexible (the same tools are used in 2d and 3d) parametric modelling is it's greatest strength.

So I decided to redraw the model in SolveSpace fully parametric. It took me 18 minutes.

Here is the result: https://youtu.be/yUa3fnDbeWw

New comment by ruevs in "Ubuntu on Windows"

ruevs — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 06:52:18 +0000

This is ancient news re-implemented. Windows NT had a POSIX layer up to about Windows Server 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem http://brianreiter.org/2010/08/24/the-sad-history-of-the-mic...