Preface

In the 2010s, 3D printing suddenly became accessible to almost everyone — whether in maker spaces or even at home. People began building their own DIY printers and writing software to control them. Naturally, these developers needed a platform to design 3D models that could be printed.

Around that time, someone came up with an idea: a programming language made specifically for people who prefer working with a keyboard rather than a mouse or graphics tablet. That language is called OpenSCAD. It turned out to be a great success, inspiring countless impressive projects.

We loved it too and created many “thingies” with it. However, as experienced software engineers, we also had a few points of critique. While OpenSCAD is easy to learn and has a syntax reminiscent of C, we felt the language could be improved in several ways:

• more specialization for creating graphics,
• better support for modular programming,
• strict typing and unit handling,
• a syntax closer to Rust than to C,
• a solid library system,
• plugin support for other programming languages,
• and a more powerful visualization concept.

Over the past few years, as we became more familiar with Rust, we started microcad as a fun side project. In 2025, we were fortunate to receive funding to develop a visualization plugin.

After more than a year of work, we’ve developed and partially implemented several concepts. There’s still plenty to do and many more ideas to explore — but we believe we’ve now reached a point where it’s time to share our work with others.