Polyscope: a C++ viewer and UI for the rapid prototyping of geometric algorithms

polyscope.run

66 points·espeed··3 comments

> Rather than forcing the user to manually convert their data types to some Polyscope types, we implement a series of templated adaptor functions, which attempt to read from the user types via a common set of strategies. These adaptors are applied to the inputs to nearly all Polyscope functions, allowing them to automatically accept user-defined types as inputs.

It's interesting how object oriented programming seems entirely orthogonal to code reuse. Polyscope seems to have solved that problem with templates, but I wonder what the compilation errors will look like if your type does not support one of the required operations. Would Concepts finally solve this problem in C++20?

Anecdotally, message-passing OO style is great for code reuse where there's a lot of state to manage - you tie together the state and the functions that operate only on that state, and you get a nice clean reusable module. Inheritance-style, however, I've never found especially useful - it seems like the layers just end up depending on each other in an opaque fashion.

Polyscope, however, seems sufficiently ambitiously abstract that "code reuse" might be too narrow of a concept. It's a great example of the fuzzy distinction between "writing a library" and "inventing a DSL".

While the project sounds interesting, there are no screenshots at all, either as a gallery or topically when describing various functionality.

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