OpenMesh 1.9.5 ported to D

[Jascha Wetzel]

Bill Baxter wrote:
>>>> neat! did you contact the maintainers? there is at least one D 
>>>> project at the ACG group atm, there might be people interested in 
>>>> supporting the D port.
> 
> How do you know? Are you a member of ACG?

no, just a student. i'm planning on writing my diploma thesis there. if 
they let me do all the coding in D, that is :)

>> it seems that the c++ version is too complex to be commonly used. 
>> apparently, only a small subset of the flexibility gets used. it might 
>> not justify the complexity of the lib.
> 
> Huh, well compared to the alternatives (LEDA, CGAL, maybe GSL) I found 
> it to be actually pretty lean, mean and straightforward.  And the LGPL 
> licensing sits better with me than the licenses of some of the 
> alternatives.  If anything is holding it back I'd guess it was the 
> _lack_ of features compared to the others.

there were some casual comments that made me infer the way OM gets used. 
maybe i took it out of context. looking at CGAL, OM does appear pretty 
lean, indeed.
what i'm missing (or haven't found) in CGAL is a consistent design for 
meshes. there is HalfedgeDS, Triangulation_*, some boost/graph usage, 
all in a rather specialized setting.

> They said the group uses it regularly in their projects, so it sounds 
> like it's not 'dead', it's just at a state where they're pretty happy 
> with how it is, and nobody has time to tinker around with it much.   I 
> suggested they set up an open repository.  Nothing.  So I offered to set 
> one up for them.  Nothing.  Then I suggested at least setting up a 
> mailing list for the project.  Nothing.  So I offered to set up the 
> mailing list for them.  Nothing.  Then I submitted patches that make 
> some improvements to the demo programs.  Nothing.    (By "nothing" I 
> mean they responded to my emails, but didn't commit to doing anything or 
> take me up on my offers.)

bummer! apparently it's not meant to be an open project, despite the name...
i'm curious about where it can be taken with D. circulators should 
simplify to delegates. maybe some of the traits business can be 
simplified as well.

one of the things i like about OM is the obvious, yet compact and 
powerful design for properties. i wish all the standard properties 
wouldn't be special cases, though. adding a normal to a vertex should 
just be an ordinary property. algorithms that need a certain set of 
properties should then be parameterized with property handles.

>> anyway, i'd use it right away and help improving it, if necessary. 
>> i've written two specialized mesh structure-sets by now and it's time 
>> to use a single, generic solution.
> 
> Cool.  That was my feeling too.  So you're a compiler/debugger guru 
> *and* a mesh wrangler?!

nah, just have been a student at the language theory group too. and 
evidently, i do have too much time on my hands ;)

 > I'd probably still be trying to get the port
> working if it weren't for ddbg.  :-)  Just asked for the dsource account.

nice. one of my motivations for ddbg comes from writing CG stuff - 
support verifying numerical algorithms that work with complex data 
structures on large amounts of data. especially hunting down numerical 
instabilities has been bothering me severely sometimes. the debugger 
should be able to help to deal with problems that are difficult to 
reproduce. ddbg is not there yet, but it'll improve. steadily... :)