The non-software engineering world is laughably behind the times when it comes to computer technology and software. SolidWorks is one of the defacto industry standard CAD packages, and their version control software essentially just creates copies of the files and increments the versions. There's no real concept of change management on the content level.

OpenSCAD is a nice example of how this kinda stuff can work. It's nowhere near viable as a general purpose CAD program, but the concept could easily scaled up to the level of SolidWorks.

Its file format works very well with version control systems, is human readable to an extent and can be opened with any text editor (so your data isn't 100% gone if one bit gets accidentally flipped).

It's worth pointing out that OpenSCAD was started by Clifford Wolf, who went on to develop Yosys, the synthesis tool used in these open FPGA workflows.

TIL!

Check out CadQuery. It's miles better then OpenSCAD.

Onshape (the complete CAD runs in a web browser) has built-in document management (version control, review, approval, sharing, ..).

I’ve used to do mechanical design with Pro/Engineer for several years. Now I occasionally do some mechanical design stuff in Onshape and all I can say is that this is a tool designed by elite mechanical engineers and developed by elite software engineers.

Regarding document management it is like going from assembly to some high level programming language.

The only downside could be that it cannot run on premise. Everything is in the cloud.

So I would not agree that non-software engineering is behind the times:-)

(I’m not affiliated with onshape)

update: Onshape was bought by PTC (the developer of Pro/Engineer). I hope they won’t screw it up:-|