FreeCAD Hits 1.0 After Two Decades, Finally Sees an End to the Toponaming Problem

FreeCAD, the open source computer aided design package, has reached the milestone of a version one-point-zero release — more than 20 years after it first became publicly available.

"In software development, version 1 usually means: our software is now stable and ready for 'real work,'" explains FreeCAD's Jo Hinchliffe. "If you are a FreeCAD user, you know that FreeCAD has been ready for real work for years, and is used in productive, professional activity all over the world already. We in fact were tempted many times in the past to cut to the chase, and call the next version 1.0 already! But we didn't.

"Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in assembly module."

The "toponaming," or "topologiucal naming," problem has been a long-standing issue both in FreeCAD and other computer-aided design packages: shapes would sometimes change their internal name when certain modeling operations were carried out — resulting in parametric features that referred to the original name breaking. Improvements have been ongoing since FreeCAD 0.19, with FreeCAD 1.0 bringing in a community-contributed algorithm to hopefully provided a platform to end the issue once and for all. "The TNP problem is not completely solved," the project's maintainers admit, with the fix currently only applied to the Sketcher and PartDesign tools, "[but] further improvements will follow in the next version."

The lack of an assembly module, meanwhile, is solved with the addition of an Assembly workbench that uses the open source Ondsel solver — and which, in classic open source style, is based on work done for Aik-Siong Koh's coincidentally-named FreeCAD software, which launched at the same time. "The porting has been done by the other FreeCAD's author himself," the maintainers write, "and with this dramatic move both FreeCADs are now finally united."

Other changes in the new release, which has been available in release candidate test builds since September, include improvements to the user interface, a streamlined start page for faster first load, the merging of the Arch workbench into BIM, improvements to the Draft and FEM workbenches, an overhauled material handling system, and more — plus a new logo for the project, chosen by the community.

"This version 1.0 is not a finished product, simply because FreeCAD is not a product," Hinchliffe notes. "It’s our project, our baby, our passion, our tool. Version 1.0 is our achievement. All of us who worked on it, from the ones who helped raise the project on its feet and are not participating any more to people who just came to help finishing translations for this release, we worked hard for this, we deserved this, and this 1.0 means: we’ve done it."

The full release notes are available in the FreeCAD wiki, with downloads available for Microsoft Windows 8 and higher, Apple macOS 10.13 High Sierra and higher, and Linux on the FreeCAD website; the source code is available on GitHub under the GNU Library General Public License 2