Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of OCC.
It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project.
And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc.
Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths.
If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions.
Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.
Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of OCC.
OpenSCAD integrated manifold into its codebase though you would need to use a development build to actually use it since the last release is in 2021. I heard manifold is significantly faster than CGAL.
It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project.
And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc.
Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths.
If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions.
Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.