On May 28, we hosted the COMPAS Developer Day 2025 at ETH Zürich’s Robotic Fabrication Lab. Around 60 participants joined in person and online for an afternoon of talks, demos, and open discussions about the latest developments in the COMPAS framework.
We kicked things off with a keynote by Tom van Mele, covering key updates from the past year: full support for Rhino 8 and CPython, and the announcement that the next major release of COMPAS will be Python 3-only. We also introduced a new initiative: COMPAS Working Groups: small, focused teams open to contributors, starting with areas like documentation, infrastructure, deployment, quality assurance, and community outreach.
The afternoon was structured into three sessions with short presentations and group Q&A:
Session 1: Tor Alva by Che-Wei Lin (ETH, DBT), COMPAS_RRC by Philippe Fleischmann and Samuel Ackermann (ETH and HSLU), and Terrestrial by Jelle Feringa (Terrestrial).
Session 2: Vaulted by Vasilis Aloutsanidis and Ines Champagne (Vaulted), Enabling Mobile DF by Gido Dielemans (TU Munich), COMPAS Timber by Panos Papacharalambous (ETH, GKR)
Session 3: COMPAS XR by Eleni Alexi (Princeton, XAIA Lab), COMPAS VP by Dominik Reisach (ETH, DBT), JAX FDM + COMPAS by Rafael Pastrana (Princeton), Coding Architecture Pavilion by Gonzalo Casas and Lorin Wiedemeier (ETH, GKR)
We wrapped up with a look at upcoming events (AEC Summer School, CAAD Futures, and the next COMPAS Dev Exchange) and then closed the day with an apéro, t-shirt give away, and hanging out around the “Coding Architecture II” pavilion just outside the lab, designed and fabricated using COMPAS & COMPAS Timber during the semester.
Throughout the day, participants added thoughts and suggestions to a shared notes document. A few standout themes included:
- Expanding subdivision capabilities (ideally following the API of Mesh)
- Adding version headers and dependency info to COMPAS JSON files
- Ongoing support for
condaenvironments (yes, that’s staying) - Sunset the “jungle” naming convention, i.e. “bluejay”
Recordings and slides will be shared soon on the COMPAS Forum! If you are interested in the working groups, sign up now!
Thanks to everyone who joined, contributed, presented, or helped organize. We’re excited about where COMPAS is headed, and even more excited about building it together!
If you’d like to stay connected, explore COMPAS further, or get involved: https://compas.dev