1.6 … and what Gmsh is not so good at

As of version 2.8, here are some known weaknesses of Gmsh:

• the BRep approach for describing geometries can become inconvenient/inefficient for large models. For complex models, or if you want to use a solid-modeler approach, you should link Gmsh with an external CAD kernel and import native files directly. (The binary versions available on http://geuz.org/gmsh/ are linked with the free CAD kernel OpenCASCADE, which enables native BREP import as well as STEP and IGES import.)
• Gmsh’s internal CAD engine is fairly limited: it only handles simple primitives and does not perform any complex geometrical operations (e.g. no calculation of intersections). For such features you should link Gmsh with an external CAD kernel (see above).
• Gmsh is not a multi-bloc mesh generator: all meshes produced by Gmsh are conforming in the sense of finite element meshes;
• Gmsh’s user interface is only exposing a limited number of the available features, and many aspects of the interface could be enhanced (especially manipulators).
• Gmsh’s scripting language is fairly limited, providing only very crude loop controls and user-defined functions, with no local variables.
• there is no global “undo” capability. You will often need to edit a text file to correct mistakes.

If you have the skills and some free time, feel free to join the project: we gladly accept any code contributions (see section Information for developers) to remedy the aforementioned (and all other) shortcomings!

This document was generated on February 9, 2014 using texi2html 5.0.