A CAD development company's view of where IcARX shines, where it required workarounds, and what we'd tell another team starting today.
This is part of a series sharing how development companies are using IcARX to bring their products to IntelliCAD-based CAD platforms. IcARX is the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium's ObjectARX®-compatible C++ API. For developers with existing ObjectARX projects, it offers a familiar API surface and a practical path to a new host CAD without a complete rewrite.
Why This Post Exists
If you're a development team weighing whether to bring an existing ObjectARX-based product to a new CAD platform, the questions you actually want answered are technical. Will my code compile and behave the way I expect? Where will I hit friction? What kind of testing matrix should I plan for?
This post is built around those questions. The source is a structured Q&A with Cadomation's CEO, Imran Anees, about their work bringing SPCAD, an advanced geospatial and surveying toolkit with more than 180 specialized commands, into the progeCAD environment using the IcARX API.
SPCAD already ran on multiple ObjectARX-compatible CAD platforms before this work began. Adding progeCAD was a deliberate platform expansion, made tractable by an architecture designed from the start to span multiple CAD environments. That foundation is part of why the IcARX path was realistic.
What follows is organized as problem to approach to outcome, with specific technical observations called out where they help.
