Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

I'm a long-time FreeCAD user, and one of my annoyances is that long-running operations lock up the entire UI and can't be aborted. This is particularly annoying if you realise you made a mistake, but have no way to go back and correct it without waiting for the operation to complete first. Or you kill FreeCAD but then you don't get to save your work.

So for my first contribution to FreeCAD I'm working on fixing this.

The underlying CAD operations are done by "OpenCascade", and at first I thought OpenCascade had no support for aborting operations part of the way through. So my first implementation was to move the operation into a child process and give the user a dialog box that would allow terminating the child process.

But it actually turns out OpenCascade does support aborting the operations! So now I'm working on doing it the OpenCascade way.

My PR is here: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/19796

Always awesome to see new freecad devs chiming in. Thank you for your efforts, I bet a lot of people are reading your comments and nodding in approval, waiting for freecad to enter its heyday.