The development of BricsCAD begins
Bricsys is a global provider of the BricsCAD® brand of engineering design software. BricsCAD is a cross-platform application offering the best 2D and 3D CAD software with powerful tools for architects, engineers, and designers.
CAD (which stands for Computer-aided design) is a way to mock up designs in both 2D and 3D simulations, which allows for such designs to be fully visualized in a variety of environments. Among others, CAD is most used by architects, engineers, and construction workers.
The benefits of using CAD software include the automation of the manual drafting process with highly productive digital tools, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This enables the users to create more efficient modeling & documentation workflows. This saves development time, reduces mistakes, and improves the overall quality of design projects.
Bricsys is a part of Hexagon AB, and headquartered in Ghent, Belgium.
Sander Valcke, UI Team Tech Lead, discusses Bricsys's switch to Qt.
With initial estimates of complete conversion totaling 50 dev-years of work, it was clear that this is was undertaking of epic proportions, spanning multiple actual years and a number of releases. This talk will focus on the high-level architecture of the qt/qml integration.
UI Team Tech Lead, Bricsys
Bricsys made the decision to switch to Qt several years ago, and despite the initial work, cost of setting up & converting their existing UI frameworks, they feel the decision was the right one.
Among the pros of using Qt as their framework, they list:
BricsCAD Specs:
Cmake/C++17 aiming to switch to C++20 soon
Currently on Qt 5.15.11, but hoping to migrate to Qt 6.x before next major release in October 2023
No custom Qt build, using official libraries
wxWidgets (Linux / Mac)
Extensive third-party API that people can use to build applications on top of BricsCAD
Bricsys is a global provider of the BricsCAD® brand of engineering design software. For the last two decades, its singular focus has been building cost-effective, mission-critical CAD tools.
Now, as a part of the global technology giant Hexagon AB, Bricsys is reinforcing its commitment to take design workflows to the next level.
Qt Group includes The Qt Company Oy and its global subsidiaries and affiliates.