Dear Janek, As you already mentioned, the title of the proposal is misleading, as our focus here is not to write a whole geometric library, but a subset of it. I'm not sure whether the proposal is publicly available somewhere but I would like to include some part of it about the scope, hoping that would clear the doubt about the expectations from this project. " Regarding the specifics of this project, what I propose to do in a summer is a limited scope Boost library for 2D mesh and polygonal environments, where I will mainly concentrate on the combinatorial information and primitive geometric operations. Thus the proposed library should more aptly be called Boost.2Dmesh than Boost.Geometry. Note that there would very likely be comments as to the incompleteness of such a "geometry" library, since I will not cover application domains like windows / GUI, computer vision, computer graphics (beyond the simple 2D subdivision), etc. By purposely limiting myself to the scope described above, I would provide a foundation for representing and manipulating planar subdivisions which is already a huge help for people writing geometric applications. It is a very common task and having both a representation and generic algorithms (which can adapt to user representation as well) suits the design principle of generic libraries very well. " Best, huseyin Janek Kozicki <janek_listy <at> wp.pl> writes:
The link from http://code.google.com/soc/boost/about.html states:
"Programming geometric algorithms, even the most trivial ones, may require detailed knowledge about the problem because of the degenerate cases that frequently occur in practice. Moreover, geometric algorithms are full of case analysis and quite error-prone to program, and can get fairly sophisticated in order to improve the asymptotic performance.
The main motivation of this proposal is to develop an easy-to-use but also high quality (both in software engineering and in algorithmic content) geometric library, sharing the same design principles as the C++ STL, which is generic and extendible. My main focus will be on design of generic algorithms for navigating and manipulating 2D subdivisions."
I am worried. The lenghty discussions about geometric library spanned several years till now on this mailing list. Similarly as with Boost.Units library everyone had different expectations.
I strongly encourage the authors to change the name of this library (similarly as "math toolkit" is suggested to be renamed into "statistics toolkit"), or to change its focus.
"2D subdivisions" is not a thing that I'd be looking for inside a "generic geometric library".