[geos-devel] [gdal-dev] Report on GEOS maintenance grant

[Regina Obe]

I concur.  Great work Dan :)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: geos-devel [mailto:geos-devel-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of
> Paul Ramsey
> Sent: Monday, February 27, 2023 12:12 PM
> To: Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co>
> Cc: gdal dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>; GEOS Development List <geos-
> devel at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [geos-devel] [gdal-dev] Report on GEOS maintenance grant
> 
> Thanks so much Dan, it’s been great having you on patrol these last few
> months, and the big changes you got through lay a nice foundation for the
> future of the library.
> 
> P
> 
> > On Feb 27, 2023, at 9:02 AM, Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Feb 27, 2023, at 8:32 AM, Daniel Baston <dbaston at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> As February comes to a close, I’m winding down the GEOS maintenance
> work that the GDAL PSC funded in 2022 [1]. I appreciate the opportunity to do
> this work and am especially thankful to those who reported issues, reviewed
> pull requests, or participated in discussions about this work.
> >>
> >> For anyone who’s interested, I wanted to share a few of the highlights from
> my perspective.
> >>
> >> New functionality: GEOS now supports reading, writing, and overlay of
> geometries with an M dimension. I added a number of C API utility functions
> requested by client library developers: GEOSLineSubstring,
> GEOSEqualsIdentical, and thread/context-specific interrupt handlers. I also
> brought in clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN that were previously only
> available in PostGIS.
> >>
> >> Performance enhancements: I found some nice performance wins in key
> GEOS algorithms such as geometry intersection testing (GEOSIntersects and
> GEOSPreparedIntersects), distance (GEOSPreparedDistance and
> GEOSPreparedDistanceWithin) and buffering complex geometries. There are
> also some gains in core internal classes such as CoordinateSequence and
> STRtree that deliver across-the-board gains.
> >>
> >> Project maintenance. I was able to simplify our CI setup by removing the
> use of Azure and AppVeyor services and bringing the associated environments
> into GitHub Actions, write a harness for performance testing and
> visualization, and perform code cleanup such as migrating from raw to
> managed pointers in key classes. I resolved a number of long-standing bug
> reports with WKT input/output, geometry simplification, and
> crashes/incorrect results from multiple algorithms in edge cases such as
> empty geometry inputs.
> >>
> >> Not everything panned out, or at least not yet. Something we’ve wanted in
> GEOS for a long time is the ability to create a GEOS geometry directly from an
> external memory buffer, such as a PostGIS LWGEOM or a GDAL
> OGRGeometry (“zero-copy”). I added experimental support for this, but so far
> I haven’t found a case where it offers much performance benefit.
> >>
> >> Dan
> >>
> >> [1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2022-February/055433.html
> >
> > Dan,
> >
> > Thank you so much for taking on these efforts in a way that was both
> reactive to the community and aligned with the stated goals of the project.
> The project was to move GEOS forward on topics that do not achieve outside
> contribution, and you took on some tough topics that reached up and down
> the codebase to provide easier to use APIs and performance wins that will be
> fun to show off in other contexts like OGR, Shapely, and PostGIS usages.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Howard
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gdal-dev mailing list
> > gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> > https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
> 
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