[quinnchr]

Isn't CGAL a dependency for PostGIS? When would you choose to use CGAL directly rather than something built on top of it (e.g. PostGIS or pgrouting)?

My use case is mostly for routing and I'm currently using a heavily modified version of OSRM. If there's potential for even more speedup I'd appreciate any resources ou can point me towards.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

PostGIS uses GEOS which is a port of JTS or CGAL depending on what "part" of PostGIS you are using.

I'm unaware of CGAL's networking support, our use case depends heavily on the standard DE9-IM relationships. I would look into graph databases like Neo4j for shortest-path and other types of network analysis. They will probably perform better than pgrouting and make it easier for you to conceptualize the problem.

If you need to do huge operations at scale (i.e. things that are just too big to fit in PostGIS and provide reliability/performance) or need 100% accuracy, I would go with straight CGAL. If not, higher level geometric implementations and platforms are probably going to do just fine.

[turboladen]

You might be thinking of GDAL.

[vetinari]

CGAL too, in the form of SFCGAL, that implements simple features on top of CGAL.