Dear Mr Jimy Byerley,
I am writing this open letter after having used the pymadcad library on a couple of personal and intrapersonal projects. My overall opinion on this library is pretty high, and I like that fact that pymadcad is not only simple to use, but also has a lot of features that allow it to be used for virtually any CAD application. However, the library doesn't come with its issues, which will be the focus of this letter.
First and foremost, I discovered that this library is pretty prone to be broken due to changes to the underlying dependencies. The first such instance I encountered was on November 2024, when due to changes in the NumPy library, alongside an erroneous version restriction for NumPy caused the library to break for some time until it was fixed after #120 was opened. I encountered a similar issue on February 2025, when I used pymadcad with Python 3.11.2 on a project which failed to compile on a more recent minor version of Python3 due to a compilation error on the arrex dependency.
Apart from dependency issues, my other major issue is that there are times when the documentation of the project isn't clear enough. For example, it took me a while to learn how to create a Circle because I had to first understand how an Axis works. Another thing which I had to figure out on my own was joining two meshes (using the + operator).
I really like pymadcad, as it makes certain things, such as exporting a mesh to a .stl file for example, way easier, while features like the show funtion certainly help a lot. However, these small issues I described above prevent me (and I am sure other people too) from using the library as freely as I would want too. I believe that this open letter will motivate everyone involved to solve those issues and perhaps bring more new users to pymadcad