CGAL is pretty cool. It was tricky to get set up. I was trying to use it as part of a mostly Python utility, and there are SWIG bindings for it that should the

CGAL is pretty cool. It was tricky to get set up. I was trying to use it as part of a mostly Python utility, and there are SWIG bindings for it that should theoretically have worked, but they were a huge pain and half the core functionality wasn't implemented at all even in the basic 2D kernel. After trying in vain to add the functionality I needed to the SWIG bindings, eventually I just wrote the core algorithm entirely in C++ (despite having no real C++ experience) and called into it from Cython. The API uses enough templated code that it would be hard to get going if you don't have a solid background in C++ or a language with an advanced type system (Haskell in my case). I didn't find it particularly difficult to get working with Homebrew. Given my scant knowledge of C++ build systems, I would have thought it would be a lot harder. If you are actually a C++ programmer I imagine it would be pretty straightforward. I agree that the licensing limits its uses quite a bit. The truth is that almost anything you build is probably going to use the GPL'd components. The only things that are LGPL are basic math and the geometry kernels.