Occt

Previously, I showed how you can study which functions call what in a library by using gdb catchpoints to observe a running process’ call stack every time a syscall is made in the application. That was useful to understand the parts of the program related to external libraries, graphics, multi-threading, and compiler optimization, but it didn’t provide any insight into the mathematical and algorithmic core of the library which generally doesn’t do any syscalls. Here I’ll be showing how you can do this with the tool callgrind. Read more...

I’ve for a while been interested in taking on some kind of project involving 3D CAD. The difficulty in that is all of the futzy computational geometry, when what I’m interested in is developing compelling tools for engineers to use. This means I need a library, and ideally an open-source one so I can easily share my work. Luckily, I found Open Cascade Technology, or OCCT. It’s a fully-featured, battle-tested CAD library with 30+ years of development, and it’s available under the LGPL 2.1 license. Read more...