Re: [boost] GGL Review

Subject: Re: [boost] GGL Review
From: Jonathan Franklin (franklin.jonathan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-16 11:23:24

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 7:06 AM, Brandon Kohn <blkohn_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> One of the more useful
> features of the library (GGL) would of course be the boolean operations. The
> problem however is clearly going to be robustness.

For some.

> I have never encountered
> a robust floating point boolean operation library in my 9 years of working
> in the geometry domain. While this may not mean it's impossible, I think it
> does mean it's unlikely.

I believe that this is because for many use-cases, it isn't worth the
run-time performance and development-time trade-off.

> I think we've
> all come to expect that when we adopt a Boost library into our work, it
> should be correct. I would suggest the requirement that the library authors
> demonstrate that their algorithm is both correct and robust. We as a
> community should help define how this is done.

In my application domain, I'm really not that interested in numerical
instability due to floating point imprecision.  For my use-cases, a
few things work fine w/ single precision, and double precision works
well for everything else.  If you can give me 100% numerical stability
without making my code slow, your code clunky to use, or delay
release, then great!

Jon