Comparing .obj parse libraries
Wavefront .obj file format is a funny one. Similar to GIF, it’s a format from the 1990s, that absolutely should not be widely used anymore, yet it refuses to go away. Part of the appeal of OBJ is relative simplicity, I guess.
In the previous blog post I asked myself a question, “is this new Blender OBJ parsing code even good?" Which means, time to compare it with some other existing libraries for parsing Wavefront OBJ files.
There’s probably a thousand of them out there, of various states of quality, maintenance, feature set, performance, etc. I’m going to focus on the ones written in C/C++ that I’m aware about. Here they are, along with the versions that I’ve used:
As you can see, even if “base” functionality of OBJ/MTL is fairly simple and supported by all the parsing libraries, some more exotic features or extensions are not supported by all of them, or even not supported by any of them.
Some libraries also differ in how they handle/interpret the more under-specified parts of the format. OBJ is a file format without any “official” specification; all it ever had was more like a “readme” style document. It’s funny that more modern alternatives, like Alembic or USD also don’t really have their specifications - they are both “here’s a giant code library and some docs, have fun”.
