On the design of CGAL a computational geometry algorithms library

Abstract

CGAL is a Computational Geometry Algorithms Library written in C++, which is being developed by research groups in Europe and Israel. The goal is to make the large body of geometric algorithms developed in the field of computational geometry available for industrial application. We discuss the major design goals for CGAL, which are correctness, flexibility, ease‐of‐use, efficiency, and robustness, and present our approach to reach these goals. Generic programming using templates in C++ plays a central role in the architecture of CGAL. We give a short introduction to generic programming in C++, compare it to the object‐oriented programming paradigm, and present examples where both paradigms are used effectively in CGAL. Moreover, we give an overview of the current structure of the CGAL‐library and consider software engineering aspects in the CGAL‐project. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Optimizing Voronoi Diagrams for Polygonal Finite Element Computations

“…Our mesh optimization technique is implemented in C++ using the CGAL library [11]. It requires less than one second for the smaller examples and about one minute for the complex mesh of Figure 10 (Mac Pro, 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon, single-threaded).…”

Exacus: Efficient and Exact Algorithms for Curves and Surfaces

“…The design of the 94.000 lines of source code and documentation of the EXACUS C++ libraries follows the generic programming paradigm with C++ templates, as it is widely known from the Standard Template Library, STL [1], and successfully used in CGAL [12,5,19]. We use concepts 5 from STL (iterators, containers, functors) and CGAL (geometric traits class, functors) easing the use of the EXACUS libraries.…”

“…Design Rationale: Our interface extends the interface in CGAL [12,5,19,22] that only distinguishes EuclideanRing, Field, and FieldWithSqrt. The finer granularity is needed for the domain of curves and surfaces, in particular, the algebraic numbers and algorithms on polynomials.…”

“…In this paper, we present the design of the EXACUS C++ libraries. We build upon our experience with CGAL [12,22] and LEDA [25].…”

A Meshing Tool Product Line Architecture

“…However, the use of software engineering principles in meshing tool design has spread only in the last five years. Some examples include the design of generic extensible geometry interfaces between CAD modelers and mesh generators [21,23,27,30], the design of object-oriented data structures and procedural classes for mesh generation [22], and the computational geometry algorithm library CGAL [14]. Also recently it was publish a discussion on the usage of formal methods for improving reliability of meshing software [13].…”