I want to put my two cents in here as a long time Rhino user and someone that develops many custom rhino/grasshopper components including a proprietary Grasshopper link to Revit that is exactly what GS is currently doing. As I continue to say I switched to Archicad because I know first hand the internals of Revit what it can and cant do and Archciad is clearly the superior product from a computer science stand point. There are some major issues I see with the GS approach however.
I think McNeel has a different/better sense of who their audience is. They know that the vast majority of those people using their API and documentation are the user base solving small issues to get production done. GS seems to be serving the professional developer base and all documentation and interaction is geared towards this. If you look at those developing for McNeel a great deal of them where in fact users that produced some amazing tool that took off and McNeel took them on where it made sense. Autodesk for all their horrible practices (we paid a major price tag to have developer contact) has also started to recognize this. Their API is pure crap but they seem to be doing a similar outreach to users who are making them look good. Dynamo was started by a graduate student I believe and has taken off as a community lead opensource project. GS appears to me, to be akin to Apple and their walled garden. Something that today is just not going to work.
I think GDL is amazing it is hands down the reason I use Archicad. The new python API is also amazing and will help solve production issues where one could very easily open up a script window and get what ever data they need. I do however think that this is simply not enough. GS must embed .net if they want to compete. Professionals are making tools with C++. Graduate students and Architect/Developers are all using .net and C# in particular. McNeel has just about every language available for their api and this is why they are so strong. They also put most of the work on github for us non programmers to look at use and make our own.
https://github.com/mcneel
this is something that GS needs to really work on. Look at all these examples right there for anyone to use.
https://github.com/mcneel/rhino-developer-samples
look at this tool open and available to many languages.
https://github.com/mcneel/rhino3dm
because of this I am helping them to integrate the .3dm format into the new Blender 2.8 something that saves me countless hours even though I spend developer time on the plugin. Something I am sure I would do if GS had a more open approach.
https://github.com/jesterKing/import_3dm
look at this! You do not have to sign up for a horribly outdated php forum and get approved just to read the docs!
https://developer.rhino3d.com/api/Rhino ... Common.htm
And now look at this. Here is a tool produced at night by an open source developer working on Blender, a project on a shoestring budget. They are producing tools their developer/users can use to write plugins. Why after so many years can GS not provide something up to date for GDL when its clear that this can be done using many existing frameworks?
https://github.com/JacquesLucke/blender_vscode
I do not mean this to be a rant or anger directed at GS. I really want to see these issues fixed because one of the major advantages that Revit / McNeel and the like have are their user base doing truly awesome things and showcasing the software they use. GS is missing this because they have not yet found the right recipe to provide the framework for this to happen. There is a post over in the Grasshopper section of this forum asking where the inspirational videos are from GS. This to me is kind of ridiculous. Every other platform the users are producing the inspirational videos, the developers behind those platforms are simply providing them with a tool set that GS has yet to do.
I hope this helps in some way
joel
EDIT:
I want to add this here because I know there will be some discussion about technical difficulties, multi platform etc.
Godot, a cross platform game engine arguably going to give unity a run for its money implemented mono with I believe 2 people in about a year. They do not have the budget GS does but I do believe that Microsoft gave them some money to do this 20k or so. Given that Microsoft is moving much of the .net run time to core I do not see why GS should not find a way to have strategic partnership to make this happen. This is something that can/should be done.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/is ... pic%3Amono