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Abstract:
CGAL is a Computational Geometry Algorithms Library written
in C++, which is developed in an ESPRIT LTR project. The goal
is to make the large body of geometric algorithms developed in the field of
computational geometry available for industrial application. In this chapter
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. Templates and the relatively new generic programming
play 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 on the current structure of the library
and consider software engineering aspects in the CGAL-project.
