Tag Archives: Barend Gehrels

Visual Studio 11 visualizers for Boost.Geometry

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Some time ago Barend Gehrels blogged about Visual Studio 2010 debugger visualizers for Boost.Geometry. Barend’s templates added to autoexp.dat file are of great help while working with the Boost.Geometry library in Visual Studio.

Recently, I’ve started using Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and discovered the new style debugger visualizers this new edition introduces. I decided to port Barend’s work to the new XML-based format in .natvis files.

vs11-visualizers-boost-geometry

All my visualizers, not only for Boost.Geometry but also for other libraries, are available in visualstudio11 Git repository on my GitHub. The .natvis files are not overly complicated and the installation is dead easy, see README file attached.

Comments, suggestions and fixes are welcome.

Quality of the World Shapefiles

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file TM_WORLD_BORDERS_SIMPL-0.3.shpBarend Gehrels from the Boost.Geometry project has posted an interesting analysis comparing available versions of the same vector data. It is Shapefile with borders of the World countries. The data is the same but different and sometimes the differences are very surprising.

Here is part 1 and part 2 of the excellent comparison made by Barend.

Introduction to Boost Geometry slides

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Boost Geometry (aka Generic Geometry Library, GGL)Slides of my very gentle introduction to Boost Geometry library are now available to download from the FOSS4G 2010 website.

The presentation gives a basic overview of the library and tries to explain how it is different to existing solutions but in such way so it’s also understandable to non-C++ programmers. Those who are looking forward to digging out very details of Boost Geometry, I recommend to check presentation which Barend Gehrels gave at BoostCon 2010.

Boost.Geometry on BoostCon’10

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Boost Geometry (aka Generic Geometry Library, GGL)Boost.Geometry talk is scheduled for BoostCon’10 conference. Thanks to Barend Gehrels, Boost.Geometry team will be represented on the conference.

In spite of the fact I’m listed as a speaker for BoostCon’10, I will not attend this amazing event. I’ve planned to be there, I can’t make it this year, unfortunately.

When Boost.Geometry release?

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Generic Geometry Library (GGL)The Boost 1.42 was released a week ago, however this release does not include Boost.Geometry (aka GGL) which was accepted 2 months ago. It is nothing uncommon, though many people have been asking obvious question, why Boost.Geometry is not there and when it will be there.

Boost.Geometry is accepted but with a sticky note attached with a list of issues that need to be solved before the library can be included in official Boost release. It means there is still plenty of work necessary to be done and as soon as they are done and confirmed, we’re in.

Hartmut Kaiser, the review manager, included compete and detailed list of all the issues that need to be addressed in the GGL review results report. Shortly, the contingencies are:

  • Robustness: complete review of all elements of the library to assure it allows to instantiate all algorithms with arbitrary number types. By design, it is possible to specialise types and algorithms of Boost.Geometry with GMP or CLN, so it computes with arbitrary-precision arithmetic. This feature is possible thanks to numeric_adaptor developed by Bruno and Barend. Also, details of computational complexity per algorithms shall be updated.
  • Concepts: during the review, a few problems have been revealed with adapting custom geometries for Boost.Geometry. The concepts are a moral backbone of the library, so they need to be sound making the adaptation process simpler as that’s what the whole idea of concepts in C++ is for.
  • Boolean operations: robustness and coping with different coordinate orders of polygons should be improved.
  • Documentation: currently only Doxygen-based documentation is available. This system does not work well for Boost, so migration to Quickbook system is to be done.
  • Testing: simply, a collection of basic unit tests is not enough and verification of the correctness of the algorithms in a wide range of use cases is necessary along with high volume and random tests.

There are also a few minor issues specified as non-contingencies, however.

It is quite a list and plenty of work that needs to be done and Barend replied on the list:

We’re working on the library, I don’t hope it will take us that long, but 1.42 was not feasable at all. I hope 1.43 but even that is already coming soon.

Tasks dispatched. Fingers crossed.

Generic Geometry Library accepted to Boost

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Generic Geometry Library (GGL) Today, Hartmut Kaiser, manager of the review of the Generic Geometry Library, announced the official results of the review.

Here we go:

Formally this review ended with 12 YES and 2 NO votes. This result reflects the overall discussion and the general consensus of this library being worth to be included into Boost.

It means that formally the Generic Geometry Library has been approved to become a part of Boost C++ Libraries collection. Happy day!

Hartmut also writes:

It is worth highlighting that most of the reviewers emphasized the excellent quality of the library design.

I would like to send out my own kudos to Barend Gehrels and Bruno Lalande, the very core team, who started the project, designed and implemented the high-quality library and eventually released it as Open Source Software.