is Boost.Geometry mature enough?

Question

I've been recently hired by a GIS company to rewrite their old geomatics libraries. So I'm currently looking for a good computational geometry library. I've seen CGAL, which is amazing, but my boss wants something free.

So I'm now checking Boost.Geometry. This library seems great, but it also seems that it is changing pretty fast. A lot of things are not implemented yet, and a lot of issues are discussed on the mailing list.

Hence my question : is Boost.Geometry mature enough so I can build something on it ? Or is the design still going to evolve ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Depending on your needs, you could look at GEOS, which is used by PostGIS for its geometry operations, among others, and is more mature than boost::geometry. However, it is hard to extend, which you will have to do yourself if you want support for more than Simple Features.

Where boost::geometry shines, in my opinion, is its ability to adapt to existing (legacy) libraries, which means that you should be able to keep some of your employer's data structures (or any other existing geometric library), and build upon them with boost::geometry.

Boost::geometry is gaining maturity and extended features pretty fast, but I don't think the design has changed much since last year (when it was accepted into boost). I would ask on the mailing list -- the authors are very active and helpful.