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Architecture

SolidCraft is a Cargo workspace in layers. A crate only depends on crates in lower layers, and cargo xtask layers fails the build otherwise.

LayerCratesRole
L0geomvectors, planes, profiles, meshes and their measures
L1sketch, kernel, renderconstraint solver and profiles; the B-rep kernel boundary (truck); view math and the headless scene description
L2docparameters, expressions, the feature timeline and its incremental evaluation
L3iodesign files, STL/OBJ/STEP/3MF export, STEP and 3MF/STL/OBJ/glTF import features
L4enginethe session and the command registry (everything is a command)
L5gpu, ui-egui, mcpcompute-shader evaluation of display tessellation plans; the swappable desktop front end; the MCP server (headless or bridged to the app)
appssolidcraft, solidcraft-clidesktop app, headless CLI

The web app, apps/solidcraft-web, is the desktop front end compiled to wasm with trunk. xtask holds the repository’s own tooling: cargo xtask ci, layers, assets, features, oracle and book.

A few rules follow from the layering:

  • Only crates/kernel touches truck. Everything above it sees SolidCraft’s own types: bodies, faces, edges, meshes and measures. See The kernel boundary.
  • The document knows nothing about commands or the UI. crates/doc holds the parameters, the feature timeline and the component tree, and evaluates them into a model.
  • Everything the user can do is a command in crates/engine. See The command engine.
  • The front end is swappable. Nothing below ui-egui depends on egui. The CLI and the MCP server run the same engine without a window. Headless pictures (solidcraft-cli snapshot, MCP screenshots, ui.render, thumbnails) are drawn on the GPU with the viewport’s own pipelines (crates/gpu, capture): the engine describes the scene (view::scene) and the host installs the renderer (engine::capture). The tiers, in order: a hardware GPU, a software adapter (Mesa lavapipe or llvmpipe, WARP), and last crates/render’s CPU rasterizer, which draws no surface analysis, highlights or legends. SOLIDCRAFT_GPU=auto walks all three, hardware and software stay on their tier (an error without one), cpu forces the rasterizer; every picture’s reply names its renderer (gpu, gpu-software, cpu) and a CPU picture carries a warning. solidcraft-cli gpu lists the adapters and the tier the policy lands on.