FAQ

Geogram FAQ

How geogram compares with other geometric programming libraries ?

There exists other libraries for geometric computing / geometry processing, such as:

• CGAL
• CinoLib
• Geometry central
• libIGL
• OpenMesh
• OpenVolumeMesh
• PMPLib
• VCGLib
• Ultimaille

It is difficult to compare different "swiss army knives" that have a completely different set of blades. The specificity of Geogram as compared to these generic libraries is that it is targeted towards some specific scenari with no compromise concerning performance and memory consumption. For instance, Geogram's 3D triangulation can be applied to pointsets with hundred millions points that we use in our research in cosmology, where the data structures used by other library would not fit in memory. This comes at the expense of less genericity (for instance, CGAL has a function to remove a point from a 3D Delaunay triangulation that Geogram does not have).

Another difference is the programming style and the design choices: Geogram is not a header-only library and makes a moderate use of modern C++ programming. This difference is rather a question of programmer's taste.

Geogram comes "with batteries installed" (nearly no external dependancies) and is easy to compile. It does not depend on BOOST (that we find too heavy, again it is a question of taste).

Geogram works under Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/Emscripten. Emscripten lets you compile programs and include them in webpages, see examples here.

How to generate dynamic libraries ?

Create in the geogram sourcetree a file CMakeOptions.txt with the following content:

if(WIN32)
set(VORPALINE_PLATFORM Win-vs-dynamic-generic)
elseif(APPLE)
set(VORPALINE_PLATFORM Darwin-clang-dynamic)
elseif(UNIX)
set(VORPALINE_PLATFORM Linux64-gcc-dynamic)
endif()

Then run configure.bat (Windows) or configure.sh (other OSes)

See geogram/cmake/options for examples of CMakeOptions.txt files and list of available options.