OCCT 6.5.5 and beta testing of 6.6.0

Dear Contributors,

Today we have announced a maintenance release 6.5.5 of OCCT libraries, intended for our customers and users who need an improved version of OCCT compatible with 6.5.4.

Now I am pleased to inform you that the next minor version 6.6.0 is ready for beta testing. This version provides changes and new features aimed to form a basis for further development:

• Official support of Mac OS X, including use of native Cocoa API (instead of X11).
• Build scripts for CMake, which is considered as a candidate for replacing WOK in the future. See Building OCCT with CMake for details.
• Visualization is refactored and optimized; use of FTGL, dynamic linking of TKOpenGl, and separate viewer for 2d are abandoned.
• Boolean operations algorithm internals has passed through in-depth refactoring.

For details on the 6.6.0 release and porting guidelines, see draft Release Notes.

We invite you to test this beta version in your applications. If you have reported some issues in Mantis bug tracker, please check those with Verified status -- we assume they are fixed, and will appreciate to see your comments in the notes of the issue. If you detect a regression, please report it as soon as possible.

Please use the commit tagged "V6_6_0_beta" in the Git repository for this testing. If you do not have direct access to the repository, you may download the archive of sources from GitWeb (just click on the "snapshot" link).

Note that for building this version an up-to date version of WOK is needed; please install it from the binaries available on the Resources page. In this version command wgenproj has been enhanced to generate CMake and XCode build scripts; new command wgendoc provides convenient means for generation of reference documentation. The users who are not ready to build from bare sources with WOK can use the complete source archive or installer on Windows. Check also documentation installer for Windows and collection of pre-built third-party libraries.

We expect 6.6.0 to be released in the middle of April (a few improvements and bug fixes are still pending), but the date will also depend on the feedback we obtain from beta testing.

Your feedback is very welcome!
Andrey