0.4.0

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/bezier/0.4.0/
Docs: https://bezier.readthedocs.io/en/0.4.0/

Performance Optimizations

• Adding Fortran speedups for many crucial computation helpers including
  • intersecting line segments
  • (vectorized) Horner's method for evaluating a Bézier curve at multiple parameters at once
  • (vectorized) Horner's method for evaluating a Bézier surface
  • computing "linearization error" (how close a curve is to a line)
  • specializing a Bézier curve to a sub-interval
  • using Newton's method to refine a curve-curve intersection
• Adding _verify switch to Surface.locate() and Curve.intersect() to selectively disable overly defensive value checking. (Making sure to use this switch during "internal" computation.)
• Making sure NumPy arrays are Fortran-contiguous as often as possible (e.g. snippets and source, via np.asfortranarray()). This is to avoid (and emphasize) a non-trivial overhead when passing a C-contiguous array to a Fortran function. (03a7242, 6064e4c, f1804f4)
• Using Horner's method in Curve.evaluate_multi() and Surface.evaluate_barycentric(), rather than inferior (sometimes non-vectorized) approaches (dee8181, 2611e64)
• Made surface-surface intersection more resilient / lenient for corner intersections. For "nearby" intersections, parameter values can be rounded to 0 or 1. (4a8458c)

New Features

• Adding optional strategy argument (one of geometric or algebraic) to Surface.intersect()
  • Added "algebraic" IntersectionStrategy via curve implicitization (reference)
• Adding Curve.reduce_() which acts as a partial inverse to Curve.elevate(). It is only a complete inverse when a curve is degree-elevated, otherwise it returns the "best" reduced form (in the least squares sense).

Interface Changes

• (Breaking change) Removing show keyword from Curve.plot(), Surface.plot() and CurvedPolygon.plot()
• Adding color keyword to Curve.plot()
• Adding alpha keyword to Curve.plot()
• (Breaking change) Splitting the Surface.evaluate_multi() method into Surface.evaluate_barycentric_multi() and Surface.evaluate_cartesian_multi()
• Adding __dict__ helpers on Curve, CurvedPolygon and Surface. These are @propertys intended only for REPL use, since classes with __slots__ no longer have a __dict__ attribute.

Miscellany

• Adding IntersectionClassification to docs (ref)
• Moving most plotting into a dedicated module. More importantly, importing plotting helpers at run-time rather at import time. So if computational code never plots, it won't eat the import cost of matplotlib. Removing matplotlib as a dependency.