Re: GNU Octave has been accepted as a GSoC 2016 mentor organization

[John Swensen]

On Feb 29, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Nir Krakauer <address@hidden> wrote:

Please let me know if you're interested in helping evaluate applications and then mentor any accepted students.

Student applications will be due March 14-25, see https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

—Nir

I haven’t been involved in Octave development a ton lately, but would like to get more involved now that I am past the grad student/postdoc days and got a faculty job. I have recently done some work with a couple of different polygon libraries and think that implementing many of the polygon functions (e.g. polybool, poly2ccw, poly2cw, poly2fv, polyjoin, polysplit, etc.) and would be something I could mentor. 

It looks like there is a partial implementation as MEX function (though not in Octave package format) at https://sites.google.com/site/ulfgri/numerical/polybool that uses both ClipperLib and GPC. I think GPC (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/gpc/#Licensing) is out of the question because of their "free for private/hobbyist/education and non-free for products/commercial" licensing. ClipperLib (http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php) used the Boost Software License. The Boost::Geometry (https://github.com/boostorg/geometry) and Boost::Polygon (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_60_0/libs/polygon/doc/index.htm) libraries could also be used and are license-friendly. 

Unfortunately, based on my evaluation of all three of these, GPC is by far the most robust solution that can handle self intersections and nearly parallel lines very, very well, but is likely not license-compatible with Octave. ClipperLib is the easiest to use and Boost::Geometry is the most powerful (but a bit confusing because of how much templating is going on).

Let me know if this sounds interesting and you want to add me to the list of potential mentors.

John S.