ADS was important because it allowed people to write compiled applications that could interface with AutoCAD, but the integration was very limited. It was great as a mechanism for professional software developers to integrate data from other systems – perhaps performing serious number-crunching or interfacing with external databases via ASI – but it wasn’t an architecture that lent itself to high performance. Not having been involved in it, I can’t talk about the goals for the R13 release, but I can talk about its impact in later years. R13 saw major parts of its codebase move to the object-oriented paradigm – via C++ – and saw the birth of the AutoCAD Runtime eXtension (ARX) API layer. Developers could now write DLLs – whether via C++ using the new ARX mechanism, or by porting legacy ADS code to ADSRX modules – that could be loaded by AutoCAD into its own process. Performance became lightning-fast: you were essentially creating modules that were executed just as if they were a core part of the product and had been written by Autodesk. In fact, ARX (which was later renamed to ObjectARX during the R14 timeframe) enabled teams within Autodesk – some of which were even outside of San Rafael! – to start to build code that worked with the AutoCAD product – as if it was part of AutoCAD – without having to build the into the codebase. This may sound like something that’s obvious in hindsight as being important to do, but nevertheless its impact should not be underestimated: the rearchitecture of the AutoCAD core – and exposure of ARX – was a change that led directly to the verticalization of Autodesk, whether via internal projects or the acquisition of external products that could now be developed by Autodesk Developer Network partners.
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