[tombert]

Just to play devil's advocate to my own point, there's really no reason you couldn't do source control for regular CAD programs is there? I know Git doesn't play super well with binaries from a space efficiency perspective, but it does work, and you could use something like Mercurial which does play ok with binaries I believe.

[15155]

You could, KiCad does this (uses a text-based LISP-like format): it's not at all human-creatable and results in huge output.

The difference is that OpenSCAD/CadQuery are dense logic formats (code) rather than just serialization formats.

Large amounts of human intent are encoded in the order of evaluation, function calls, etc.

[throw46365]

Mm. It strikes me that it might be more difficult to visualise changes.

e.g. in FreeCAD land:

FreeCAD uses a "zip-and-manifest" file format so there are ways to unpack that and manage it in git, but one of the challenges is getting useful human-readable diffs.

One offering is WebTools Git:

https://wiki.freecad.org/WebTools_Git

This versions the binary file but there are useful tips about using a FreeCAD utility to get a text diff using fcinfo.

On unpacking and re-packing the FCStd zip file:

https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/freecad-and-git/

Not sure what Ondsel is doing for its online engineering suite, which does have version history.