Simon Willison’s Weblog

23rd September 2023 - Link Blog

TG: Polygon indexing (via) TG is a brand new geospatial library by Josh Baker, author of the Tile38 in-memory spatial server (kind of a geospatial Redis). TG is written in pure C and delivered as a single C file, reminiscent of the SQLite amalgamation.

TG looks really interesting. It implements almost the exact subset of geospatial functionality that I find most useful: point-in-polygon, intersect, WKT, WKB, and GeoJSON—all with no additional dependencies.

The most interesting thing about it is the way it handles indexing. In this documentation Josh describes two approaches he uses to speeding up point-in-polygon and intersection using a novel approach that goes beyond the usual RTree implementation.

I think this could make the basis of a really useful SQLite extension—a lighter-weight alternative to SpatiaLite.