Code flexibility and program efficiency by genericity: Improving CGAL'S arrangements

Abstract

Arrangements of planar curves are fundamental structures in computational geometry. We describe the recent developments in the arrangement package of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library, making it easier to use, to extend and to adapt to a variety of applications. This improved flexibility of the code does not come at the expense of efficiency as we mainly use generic-programming techniques, which make dexterous use of the compilation process. To the contrary, we expedited key operations as we demonstrate by experiments. © Springer-Verlag 2004.