[postgis-devel] Moving some algorithms into liblwgeom

J Smith dark.panda+lists at gmail.com
Tue Nov 13 12:18:40 PST 2012


G'day list.

The recent talk about python and ctypes[1] has got me to thinking it
would be pretty slick to be able to wrap python (or in my case, ruby)
around liblwgeom and have access to the various algorithms available
in liblwgeom. I have already written a ruby gem that wraps the
functionality of GEOS in an FFI interface called ffi-geos[2] and I
think it would be pretty sweet to also wrap liblwgeom in a similar
manner. I had already begun the process of implementing some of the
algorithms available in PostGIS such as ST_SnapToGrid in native ruby
code using PostGIS as a guide, but it would be even nicer I think to
wrap the actual PostGIS implementations themselves.

I took a look at the source for ST_SnapToGrid as an example and notice
that the implementation of the various grid snapping functions are
currently in the postgis directory and not actually a part of
liblwgeom. I extracted the relevant functions from the postgis
directory and put them into liblwgeom, replaced the calls to palloc,
pfree, etc., elog, POSTGIS_DEBUG and so forth with their equivalent
calls such as lwalloc, lwerror, LWDEBUG and the like and got the grid
functions working in liblwgeom on their own. The PostGIS functions
themselves reference them accordingly and everything seems to work
fine (no regressions after a "make check" at least, and I notice that
ST_SnapToGrid is used all over the place in the regression tests, so
that's a good sign.)

I then wrote the necessary wrapper code in ruby for the gridspec
struct and the calls to the lwgeom_grid and things look good -- I'm
now able to call something like the following in ruby:

LWGeom::Geometry.new('POINT (10.10 20.20)').snap_to_grid(1)

And that's pretty cool.

The question is, would there be any interest in moving some these
sorts of algorithms out of the postgis directory and into liblwgeom so
they can be called directly from code linked to liblwgeom? I've only
taken a look at the snap to grid code because it seemed to be a good
starting point given how often it gets used in the regression tests,
but I'd be interested in moving similar code into liblwgeom.

Thoughts or suggestions? Seems like it would be a cool project, and I
like the idea of having access to PostGIS' spatial functions and
algorithms in C from my ruby code. (And perhaps python and whatever
else.)

Cheers

[1] - http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/2089
[2] - https://github.com/dark-panda/ffi-geos



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