CPP-GL

General purpose header-only template graph library for C++20 and newer standards.

Overview

• The goal of the project was to create a higlhy customizable, intuitive and easy to work with graph library for the modern C++ standards.
• The CPP-GL library's implementation relies solely on the C++ standard library (it does not require installing any additional tools) and is designed to be compatible with the C++ standard tools, e.g. range-based loops, std algorithms, the ranges library, stream operations, etc.
• The library relies heavily on concepts to acheive abstraction instead of interfaces and abstract classes to minimize the overhead associated with virtual tables and dynamic dispatch.

Note

v1.0.* and v1.0-prerelease-* versions of the library have been developed as the Bachelor of Engineering project at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology

Faculty: W04N - Faculty of Information and Communication Technology

Field of study: Algorithmic Computer Science

Table of content

• Installing the library
• CMake integration
• Documentation
• Dev notes
• Compiler support
• Licence

Installing the library

The use the CPP-GL library in your project you can download the source code from the releases page and add the <cpp-gl-root>/include path to the include directories of your project.

CMake integration

The CPP-GL library can also be included in a CMake project by adding the following to the CMakeLists.txt file of your project:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.12)

project(my_project LANGUAGES CXX)

# Include FetchContent module
include(FetchContent)

# Fetch the CPP-GL library
FetchContent_Declare(
    cpp-gl
    GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/SpectraL519/cpp-gl.git
    GIT_TAG <tag> # here you can specify the desired tag or branch
)

FetchContent_MakeAvailable(cpp-gl)

# Define the executable for the project
add_executable(my_project main.cpp)

set_target_properties(my_project PROPERTIES
    CXX_STANDARD 20 # or newer
    CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED YES
)

# Link against the cpp-gl library
target_link_libraries(my_project PRIVATE cpp-gl)

Documentation

Note

The CPP-GL library does not use any dedicated documentation tools in the initial release, however it is planned to add such a tool in a future release

Quick start

The core of the library is the template graph class which holds the graph's vertices and edges and defines methods allowing for the manipulation of the graph's structure.

#include <gl/graph.hpp>

#include <iostream>
#include <format>

int main() {
    // initialize the graph with 5 vertices
    gl::graph<> graph(5);

    // add some edges
    graph.add_edge(0, 1);
    graph.add_edge(1, 4);
    graph.add_edge(4, 2);
    graph.add_edge(4, 3);

    // print the size of the graph
    std::cout << std::format("number of vertices: {}\n", graph.n_vertices())
              << std::format("number of edges: {}\n", graph.n_unique_edges());
}

The graph class can be easily customized to suit your needs by defining the directional and implementation types of the graph as well as the vertex and edge properties types.

While the gl::graph class is the key element of the library, it's not the only one. The CPP-GL library provides a wide range of functionalities designed to handle various graph-related operations efficiently. For detailed explanations and usage examples of these features, please refer to the dedicated documentation pages linked below.

• The graph class - library's core
• The vertex and edge classes - representation of the graph's elements
• I/O operations
• Graph topology generators
• Algorithms
• Core utility types
• Additional functionality

Dev notes

The instructions and requirements of working on the CPP-GL project can be found here.

Compiler support

Compiler	Min version
GNU G++	13
Clang	17

Note

Although currently the project has been properly verified using only the G++ and Clang compilers it should work fine with other compilers with C++20 support like MSVC.

Licence

The CPP-GL project uses the MIT Licence which can be found in the LICENCE file