Comment regarding GeoInterface

[Maarten Pronk]

Congratulations on the book, it's looking very good! I'm looking forward to the sections still in progress.

While skimming along, I encountered the following in 3.3:

If we treated this geometry as a generic polygon represented by a vector of vertices in memory, like it is done in GeoInterface.jl for example, we wouldn’t be able to dispatch optimized code that is only valid for a triangle:

I agree with the overall point, generic representations of polygons from GIS are bad for any optimization. But I don't think the example make sense here, because GeoInterface can actually do what you want here, as it has a TriangleTrait, and we dispatch on it for things like npoint (https://juliageo.org/GeoInterface.jl/stable/guides/defaults/#Fallbacks). Besides, as an interface, it doesn't decide on how something should be represented in memory.

Quick example for a LineString:

julia> using GeoInterface
julia> l = GeoInterface.Wrappers.Line([[1,2], [1,2]])
GeoInterface.Wrappers.Line{false, false, Vector{Vector{Int64}}, Nothing, Nothing}([[1, 2], [1, 2]], nothing, nothing)

julia> @code_llvm GeoInterface.npoint(l)
;  @ /Users/evetion/.julia/packages/GeoInterface/8VGPL/src/interface.jl:146 within `npoint`
define i64 @julia_npoint_566({ {}* }* nocapture noundef nonnull readonly align 8 dereferenceable(8) %0) #0 {
top:
  ret i64 2
}

I would propose to remove the "like it's done in GeoInterface for example" from the sentence above. A replacement, if needed, could be like it's done in GIS/Simple Features representations (such as WKT/WKB, etc).

[Júlio Hoffimann]

You are taking a specific implementation of the interface, in this case a GeoInterface.Wrappers.Line and trying to prove a point about the interface, which is not valid. The GeoInterface.jl is still an interface with the issues raised in the book.