Re: [boost] interest on a geometry library

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-26 04:39:17

"Michael Andersen Nexø" wrote
>> Hi, is there any interest on a geomery library?
> Hi,

Hi Michael.

> Following in the steps of Jason and Andy, I'd like to add into the fray
> my own attempt at a generic geometry library. I've uploaded the code to
> the Boost vault at 'Math - Geometry/MN_Geometry_01.zip'
>
> Have a look and let me know what you think. Obviously, I would be
> willing to release all or parts of the code under the Boost license if a
> library in Boost were to use any of this.

Heres some comments from skimming your library  quickly.

point relative to line utilities e.g left_of are useful useful though I would 
expect left_of to be able to tell me that the point is on the line too. 
Presumably it could return 1 == left_of , 0 == on the line , -1 ==right_of etc.

path simplification utilities also useful. Maybe Could have used them myself!

Not much in favour of the cast functions. The need to cast often usually 
indicates a design problem. In this case I think it may be because specifying a 
point type is flawed (as I am often fond of repeating ) unless you define 
addition of points.

Expression template stuff is a general utility is it not? Could be used outside 
geometry library, so it might be better to split that. The use of 
promotion_traits etc might soon be superceded by Boost.Typeof which should be 
available in the next version of the boost distro. Also could be done so as both 
et and not et could be used together?

Nice to see a GUI based example, though I havent tested it yet. One day maybe in 
the distant future it will use the cross -platform C++ standard GUI system ;-)

Overall there seems to be  a lot of useful stuff here.
The previous discussion re the minimum primitives seems to hold (vector,matrix, 
quaternion).

Is anyone interested to start on moving a Boost.Geometry lib forward now? I 
would be interested to do it but my first commitment is to my weird and 
wonderful physical quantities library and as I have mentioned previously I think 
trying to incorporate that into a general geometry library would cause too great 
a strain on it.

regards
Andy Little