Zoo is building a commercial grade product suite from first principles. They're writing a new geometry kernel and optimizing it for GPUs. They wrote a new domain specific language for CAD [0]. They're running the kernel on the cloud behind an API, streaming video to the client and billing by the server-minute. Ideally that will deliver great performance and keep the tool accessible to casual users.
The really exciting thing, for me anyway, is they want to unify design-by-code, design-by-mouse, and design-by-ai. Start with a plain language description of what you want. Get a fully parametric object on your screen. Click around making adjustments. Pull up the code and make precise changes. Keep a complete changelog in git.
Anyway, much more detail here: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomo...
That sounds absolutely horrible though. There is no chance of it being truly free because the servers cost money. You are fully locked-in in that system. It won't work offline. You can't use it for secret projects...
Unless it's intended for companies to run the API on their own servers?