Developer Announcement - C++ API removal

Developers Developer Announcements
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Hello SketchUp Developers!

I’d like to make you aware of the upcoming removal of our C++ API. All the code for the C++ API has been removed and will no longer be accessible in any future release of SketchUp or the SketchUp SDK.

SketchUp recently released SketchUp 2019 Maintenance 1. The SDK that accompanied that release will be the last SDK that contains any portion of the C++ API. Additionally, SketchUp 2019 M1 will be that last version of SketchUp that can make use of the C++ exporter interface.

This is something we’ve been working on and talking about for quite some time. We removed the ability to write to the ‘live’ SketchUp model with the release of SketchUp 2013. Since then we’ve been working diligently on the C API and we feel the C API is at a point now where it is a complete replacement for the C++ API.

Who does this affect?

Anyone that is still using the C++ API which has been included in the “deprecated” folder in the SDK will need to migrate their code to the C API. You will still be able to read and write SketchUp 2019 and earlier .skp files using the C++ API that we have already released. But you will not be able to add a custom exporter that uses the C++ API to ANY future release of SketchUp, even if we release another version of SketchUp in the 2019 product family.

We greatly appreciate our developer community and value your feedback. Thank you!

Chris Fullmer
SketchUp Product Manager
Extensibility Team

3 Likes
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Congratulations! It must be wonderful to purge a long deprecated functionality from the code base. :smiley:

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Does the combination of these two sentences mean that in the next release, we will be able to write to the live model with the C API?

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No. Write access is still not possible.

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Such an important message should be send directly to registered developers by e-mail, not by a forum post.

I am glad that C++ SDK is finally dropped and that C SDK is mature enough.

The idea of changing the API between 2019.x releases is a completely bad though.

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Hi @Tomasz, this forum post was accompanied by an email that did go to every email address registered as a developer on Extension Warehouse. I’ll check to see if your email was listed, and follow up with you directly. Thanks!

Chris

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Cadalog just received word today. I would think waiting until the next version of SketchUp (2020?) would be prudent. Our extensions use the skpdoc to access the “live” model data running in SketchUp. The Skpdoc is used as a pointer to ISkpDocument of the old C++ API. The plugin accesses all the model data through the pointer. Is there an equivalent to that in the new C API?

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model.skpdoc(true)