Re: [Help-gsl] Geometry, transformations, etc.

[Brian Gough]

Dimitris Papavasiliou writes:
 > Altogether this is no big deal to implement but it would be quite useful 
 > as I have not found any alternative library for C and even if there was 
 > one, I'd probably end up using the gsl as well later on for its other 
 > features.  Therefore I would be willing to implement it if it's 
 > considered to fit into the overall gsl framework.

Hello,

I don't know of any such general purpose 3d-geometry package although
there are some GNU finite element-type programs which may include
something similar.

For small vectors I don't think you would want to allocate the vector
elements on the heap in the way that gsl_vector does.  It would be
more efficient to use a struct, as for complex numbers, and perform
all manipulations using inline functions.  So the interfacing to gsl
functions wouldn't be seamless because of the difference.  I did
consider including 3 and 4 vectors in GSL at one point but left them
out for this reason, assuming that people writing geometry programs
would probably have their own code for it.

Certainly a general purpose C geometry package would be a useful thing
to have generally and independently of GSL.  Possibly there is
something in games programming that already does it -- you could look
on the FSF free software directory http://directory.fsf.org/

-- 
Brian Gough

Network Theory Ltd,
Publishing the GSL Manual --- http://www.network-theory.co.uk/gsl/manual/