Benchmarks

This directory measures geo-utils-cpp against three popular C++ geometry libraries on two axes:

1. Speed — Google Benchmark micro-benchmarks for distance, heading, contains, area, and path_length.
2. Disk footprint — stripped binary size of a minimal consumer plus the on-disk install size of each library.

The benchmarks are not built by default and not run in CI. Set -DGEO_UTILS_CPP_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON to opt in.

Results, methodology, and per-library trade-offs live in docs/benchmarks.md. This file covers only the mechanics: installing competitors, building, and running.

Installing competitors

The CMake build looks each library up via find_package and skips the benchmark binary for any competitor it can't find — so you only need to install the libraries you want to compare against.

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

brew install s2geometry boost geographiclib

vcpkg

vcpkg install s2geometry boost-geometry geographiclib

(Then point CMake at the vcpkg toolchain file with -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$VCPKG_ROOT/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake.)

apt (Debian/Ubuntu)

S2 is not in apt; install from source or vcpkg. The other two:

sudo apt install libboost-dev libgeographiclib-dev

Building and running speed benchmarks

cmake -S . -B build-bench \
    -DGEO_UTILS_CPP_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build-bench --target bench_all -j

# Run any one binary:
./build-bench/benchmarks/bench_geo_utils
./build-bench/benchmarks/bench_naive
./build-bench/benchmarks/bench_s2          # if S2 was found
./build-bench/benchmarks/bench_boost       # if Boost was found
./build-bench/benchmarks/bench_geographiclib  # if GeographicLib was found

Each binary supports the standard Google Benchmark flags. To produce a single combined JSON report:

for b in build-bench/benchmarks/bench_*; do
    "$b" --benchmark_format=json --benchmark_out="$(basename $b).json"
done

Measuring disk footprint

./benchmarks/size/measure.sh

This builds a minimal "distance + point-in-polygon" consumer against every library it can find, strips the resulting binary, and reports both the binary size and the on-disk install size of each library. Override compiler or flags via CXX= and CXXFLAGS=; pass STATIC=1 to build statically linked binaries instead.