Re: [boost] interest on a geometry library

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-21 21:27:52

"Nigel Stewart" wrote

> Something similarly scoped to my own C++ math/geometry
> functionality would be of great interest...
>
> http://www.nigels.com/glt/doc/group___math.html
>
> Bounding box, ray, plane, 3x3 matrix, 4x4 matrix,
> 2d, 3d and 4d vectors...

It looks very interesting. I am unclear as to your intents with it though. Are
you suggesting that code as a basis for a boost effort? AFAIK there would be
difficulties re the license as a basis for a boost library I think. The OpenGL
stuff is very interesting (see below re a viewer).  I think there needs to be a
cut off between geometry and graphics  though. Its difficult to know where that
cut off is, though I would have thought a bounding box , ray etc would be
clearly graphics rather than geometry?  I would guess that an initial aim for
the project could be to identify the minimal essential geometry primitives/ and
functions. There are for instance various ways to represent a line and so on.
But some features keep cropping up e.g I'm glad to see the matrices, though it
looks like quaternions must be included too.

OTOH a geometry library makes much more sense if you can see what you are doing
visually, so a simple portable Viewer based on OpenGL might also be a useful
basic requirement. As I understand it its relatively easy and portable to do
this using GLUT ( though I guess you'd know a lot more about that ? ), Maybe a
cross-platform stand alone graphics viewer would be a good  pre-requisite to a
geometry project...

regards
Andy Little