Suggestion: Note whether each lib supports callbacks about ply_io_benchmark HOT 2 OPEN

This is a good suggestion, I'll try to add a column to lib comparison once I verify the callback support.

That being said, I am curious about your use case - I assume that you have some process that generates a lot of points and you wish to store them as .ply files? I had a bunch of ideas about changing msh_ply, so understanding this usecase better would be very useful. For example, do you know the number of point ahead of time or not?

Given that .ply is straight forward format (text header + binary or text data blob), you could set your writing like this?
Note that this is just pseudocode.

FILE* fp = fopen(filename, "wb")
ply_header_t header = setup_header_from_descriptors(descriptors, descriptor_count);
write_header(fp, &header)

while(true)
{
 vertex_t v = generate_vertex(...);
 write_vertex(fp, v);
 if (done_generating_vertices(...))
 {
   break;
 }
}

fclose(fp);

from ply_io_benchmark.

I assume that you have some process that generates a lot of points and you wish to store them as .ply files?

Yes. The thing producing the points does so in batches. So far I've just hand-coded an ASCII writer - so it looks something like this (pseudocode-ish):

      writePLYHeader();
      
      data->setPointProcessingFunc( [&]( const std::vector<PointRecord> &inList ) {
         for ( const auto &cPoint : inList )
         {
            if ( filterPoint( cPoint ) )
            {
               continue;
            }
            
            // write parts of cPoint we are interested in to PLY file
         }
      } );

      data->process(); // processes all data, calling point processing func for each batch

Where PointRecord is a struct with x, y, z, r, g, b, and some other data about a point.

It works fine (it's essentially what you have outlined in pseudocode - just with a callback), but I'd like a binary option and I also need to add the reading side, so I thought I'd look for a battle-tested, simple library to hook in here.

With a PLY library using a callback system, I think I can just connect the callback system above to it and avoid using extra storage or having to do extra processing.

do you know the number of point ahead of time or not?

I do not because of the filtering being done.

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