libgeos/geos

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1494 stars · 419 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

GEOS is a C/C++ library for computational geometry on 2D vector geometries, implementing the OGC Simple Features standard. It is a port of the JTS Topology Suite and serves as the core geometry engine behind PostGIS, QGIS, GDAL, Shapely, and R's sf package.

Use cases

• compute intersections, unions, and buffers on polygons
• check spatial predicates like intersects, contains, and within
• read and write WKT and WKB geometry formats
• build a spatial index (STR-packed R-tree) for fast lookups
• validate and repair invalid polygon geometries
• power spatial queries in a GIS or mapping application
• calculate distances, areas, and convex hulls of geometries

When to choose

• you need a mature, battle-tested 2D geometry engine with a stable C API
• you are building geospatial software and want the same algorithms as PostGIS or Shapely
• you need thread-safe geometry operations via the reentrant C API
• you work with planar/Cartesian coordinate data and OGC Simple Features

When to avoid

• you need geodetic computations on the Earth's ellipsoid - GEOS is strictly planar 2D
• you need 3D geometry operations
• you want a stable C++ API across versions - only the C API is ABI-stable
• you need raster or coordinate reference system transformations - use GDAL or PROJ instead

Facets

library · maturity stable

geospatial math sdk developer-tools cpp c cross-platform windows computational-geometry gis spatial-index wkt wkb postgis shapely jts-port ogc-simple-features geospatial algorithms maps linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="libgeos/geos")