OpenSCAD's CSG output is recommended for pre-processing SCAD files to get rid of unsupported elements. However, OpenSCAD does not resolve all of the difficult stuff. E.g., 'minkowski' remains a tree node. So an idea may be to invoke OpenSCAD automatically to pre-process anything that contains unsupported elements, and to do so in a smart way, to do only those things that are really not supported. E.g., first invoke OpenSCAD to convert to variable and module free CSG, and then for each 'minkowski' or whatnot, invoke OpenSCAD for that subtree only to convert to STL, which can be loaded back as a polyhedron.
Obviously this will be slow, but (a) it's better than no support at all, and (b) such 3D operations are slow by nature, and Hob3l is only fast by avoiding 3D operations globally, so localised operations are hopefully still faster.
OpenSCAD's CSG output is recommended for pre-processing SCAD files to get rid of unsupported elements. However, OpenSCAD does not resolve all of the difficult stuff. E.g., 'minkowski' remains a tree node. So an idea may be to invoke OpenSCAD automatically to pre-process anything that contains unsupported elements, and to do so in a smart way, to do only those things that are really not supported. E.g., first invoke OpenSCAD to convert to variable and module free CSG, and then for each 'minkowski' or whatnot, invoke OpenSCAD for that subtree only to convert to STL, which can be loaded back as a polyhedron.
Obviously this will be slow, but (a) it's better than no support at all, and (b) such 3D operations are slow by nature, and Hob3l is only fast by avoiding 3D operations globally, so localised operations are hopefully still faster.