go-geos

Package go-geos provides an interface to GEOS.

Install

$ go get github.com/twpayne/go-geos

You must also install the GEOS development headers and libraries. These are typically in the package libgeos-dev on Debian-like systems, geos-devel on RedHat-like systems, and geos in Homebrew.

Features

• Fluent Go API.

• Low-level Context, CoordSeq, Geom, PrepGeom, and STRtree types provide access to all GEOS methods.

• High-level geometry.Geometry type implements all GEOS functionality and many standard Go interfaces:

  • database/sql/driver.Valuer and database/sql.Scanner (WKB) for PostGIS database integration.
  • encoding/json.Marshaler and encoding/json.Unmarshaler (GeoJSON).
  • encoding/xml.Marshaler (KML).
  • encoding.BinaryMarshaler and encoding.BinaryUnmarshaler (WKB).
  • encoding.TextMarshaler and encoding.TextUnmarshaler (WKT).
  • encoding/gob.GobEncoder and encoding/gob.GobDecoder (GOB).

  See the PostGIS example for a demonstration of the use of these interfaces.

• Concurrency-safe. go-geos uses GEOS's threadsafe *_r functions under the hood, with locking to ensure safety, even when used across multiple goroutines. For best performance, use one geos.Context per goroutine.

• Caching of geometry properties to avoid cgo overhead.

• Optimized GeoJSON encoder.

• Automatic cleanup of GEOS objects.

Memory management

go-geos objects live mostly on the C heap. go-geos sets cleanup functions on the objects it creates that free the associated C memory. However, the C heap is not visible to the Go runtime. The can result in significant memory pressure as memory is consumed by large, un-freed geometries, of which the Go runtime is unaware.

Ownership

Returned sub-geometries (e.g. polygon rings or geometries in a collection) and coordinate sequences are owned by the geometry and are only valid for as long as the original geometry exists. If you need to persist a sub-geometry for longer than the original geometry you must clone it.

Errors, exceptions, and panics

go-geos uses the stable GEOS C bindings. These bindings catch exceptions from the underlying C++ code and convert them to an integer return code. For normal geometry operations, go-geos panics whenever it encounters a GEOS return code indicating an error, rather than returning an error. Such panics will not occur if go-geos is used correctly. Panics will occur for invalid API calls, out-of-bounds access, or operations on invalid geometries. This behavior is similar to slice access in Go (out-of-bounds accesses panic) and keeps the API fluent. When parsing data, errors are expected so an error is returned.

Comparison with github.com/twpayne/go-geom

github.com/twpayne/go-geom is a pure Go library providing similar functionality to go-geos. The major differences are:

• go-geos uses GEOS, which is an extremely mature library with a rich feature set.
• go-geos uses cgo, with all the disadvantages that that entails, notably expensive function call overhead, more complex memory management and trickier cross-compilation.
• go-geom uses a cache-friendly coordinate layout which is generally faster than GEOS for many operations.

go-geos is a good fit if your program is short-lived (meaning you can ignore memory management), or you require the battle-tested geometry functions provided by GEOS and are willing to handle memory management manually. go-geom is recommended for long-running processes with less stringent geometry function requirements.

GEOS version compatibility

go-geos is tested to work with the versions of GEOS tested on CI. See here.

Calling functions unsupported by the underlying GEOS library will result in a panic. Users can use VersionCompare to be sure that a function exists.

Contributing

Please check CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions before you open a pull-request!

License

MIT