I'm working on a patch for POV, and I'd like to keep it in c, but I've come
up with a problem, namely, I don't really want to program a complex data
structure in c, but I need to.

See, I've got a matrix of edge counts from vertex to vertex in a mesh.  In
general, the count is 0, and only for a very few is it larger (5-7 per
vertex, I'd guess, but there are many thousand vertices in a large mesh)

My initial run works fine, but it uses a basic matrix of values for storing
these.  It's mostly empty, and *very* expensive, due to the large number of
vertices.

If I were working in c++, I could store non-zero elements in a map with a
lookup, but in c that isn't an option.  So I'm left with implementing my own
data structure, which is icky.

Or, maybe there's something already out there.  Does anyone know of such a
data structure that I could use, maybe within POV itself?  If not, I might
just write the bit of code I need in c++ and say to heck with it, but I'd
rather stay 'standard', if such can ever be said when discussing a patch. :/

Geoff

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