-One such project is the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel. Waagner-Biro was awarded the construction contract for the Dome. For the cladding of this dome more than 450´000 individual cutting and drilling patterns of custom aluminium extrusions had to be described and automated. The shear scale and complexity of the cladding on the dome required us to re-evaluate our parametric design approach. I developed a F# application to represent and organize all cladding elements of the dome. It includes a small geometry kernel and an adapted version of the Half Edge Data Structure to efficiently query the neighbourhood of each element. I used [Rhino] (http://www.rhino3d.com/) and its .NET API to host the F# DLL for drawing and visualisation. This application enabled us to have an integrated workflow from the main geometry setout all the way done to the manufacturing data in a single parametric model. This project was the first use of F# at Waagner-Biro for a large scale project. The switch to F# form dynamic scripting languages helped to reduce development time and runtime. The strongly typed environment, algebraic data types and immutable data helped to avoid a whole range of bugs and fits well the domain of generating static 3d geometry. I see great potential for F# to be used as scripting languages in CAD, especially since most big CAD packages do already offer a .NET API.
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