Re: upgrade to c++11

[Alexander Kobel]

On 07/14/2013 10:41 PM, Frédéric Bron wrote:
> > I had taken a look previously at CGAL<URL:http://www.cgal.org/>  since
> > the kind of stuff we are doing with skylines would benefit from
> > ready-made code like
> > <URL:http://www.cgal.org/Manual/latest/doc_html/cgal_manual/Envelope_2/Chapter_main.html>
> > and frankly, doing things like computational geometry tasks is
> > a) a resource drain
> > b) a source for problems
>
> It seems that cgal makes more than boost::geometry that cannot compute
> convex hull of curves.

Disclaimer: (By choice of PhD topic and working group,) I'm a CGAL 
developer, though rarely active and if so, then not in one of the 
publicly visible areas.

CGAL is a very neat library if you need robust and exact geometry 
processing. It's complex to set up though (the current workflow requires 
CMake and, for a "typical" setup, quite a number of dependencies), so I 
don't know how nicely it plays with GUB. OTOH, the hard requirements 
boil down to Boost and GMP+MPFR(+MPFI). There's currently progress on 
even removing GMP as a dependency, but for us GMP licensing is a 
non-issue, and using it makes your CGAL life a lot easier.
For use cases like skylines of segments which mostly deal with linear 
geometry and are very unlikely to hit degenerate cases, CGAL is a very 
heavy hammer. But using it saves you from even thinking about what 
situations can occur, and this code is highly optimized.

If you know a good piece of code to test a migration to CGAL, give me a 
ping, and I'll try to help.


Best,
Alexander