Introduction

Polylib is a free C library for doing computations on polyhedra. The library is operating on objects like vectors, matrices, lattices, polyhedra, Z-polyhedra, unions of polyhedra and other intermediary structures. It provides functions for all important operations on these structures. Polylib can be downloaded from http://www.irisa.fr/polylib/polylib.tgz This document is Polylib user's manual. It contains the information needed to understand what Polylib does, how it can be installed, and a few words about how it is implemented. In this introduction, we first describe polyhedra, then we present the applications of Polylib, we develop a little bit the relationship between polyhedra and parallelization techniques, we provide a few references, we present the organization of Polylib, and finally, we present the remaining of the document. This documentation is clearly imperfect. But an imperfect documentation is certainly better than no documentation at all. We are constantly correcting and improving our library (see its history on Polylib web site) and in this time the documentation is suffering the same process. You can download the last version from the official Polylib page: http://www.irisa.fr/polylib