---
title: "Speeding Up Geodesic Tracing in geometry-central"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/speeding-up-geodesic-tracing-in-geometry-central-iln5l7jal
source_url: https://cprimozic.net/notes/posts/speeding-up-geodesic-tracing-in-geometry-central/
type: article
source: "Casey Primozic"
published: 2026-03-31T12:29:55.823Z
updated: 2026-03-31T12:55:49.461Z
tags: ["performance", "c++", "webassembly"]
reading_time: 3
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Speeding Up Geodesic Tracing in geometry-central

**[Casey Primozic](https://daily.dev/sources/cprimozic)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A developer working on procedural mesh generation needed to trace millions of geodesic paths using the geometry-central C++ library (compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten). Profiling revealed that Eigen's ColPivHouseholder solver was the bottleneck in the Cartesian-to-barycentric coordinate conversion. By replacing the generic Eigen solver with a direct, inline math implementation sourced from Gamedev Stack Exchange (originally from Christer Ericson's Real-Time Collision Detection), the function achieved over 3x speedup. The optimized code was pushed to a public fork of geometry-central.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://cprimozic.net/notes/posts/speeding-up-geodesic-tracing-in-geometry-central/>

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Tags: [#performance](https://daily.dev/tags/performance), [#c++](https://daily.dev/tags/c++), [#webassembly](https://daily.dev/tags/webassembly)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/speeding-up-geodesic-tracing-in-geometry-central-iln5l7jal)