About FOSSIL

FOSSIL (FOrtran Stereo Litography parser) is a pure Fortran 2003+ library for reading, writing, and manipulating STL (stereolithography) mesh files. It provides three OOP-designed types — file_stl_object, surface_stl_object, and facet_object — that together handle the full lifecycle from file I/O to advanced geometry operations.

Modern computational science and engineering tools often require STL mesh handling. FOSSIL fills that gap with a clean, user-friendly API — no C or C++ dependencies, no external mesh libraries.

The library is designed with a test-driven approach; every surface operation is exercised by an automated test program in src/tests/.

Authors

Stefano Zaghi · stefano.zaghi@cnr.it

Chief Yak Shaver, Accidental Research Scientist, and HPC Farmer — CFD researcher who decided that one more day debugging Fortran build systems was one day too many, opened a Python REPL "just to prototype," and now finds himself maintaining a meshing library, a chimera assembler, an MPI load balancer, and the seven blog tabs he keeps meaning to read.

Claude (Anthropic)

Omniscient Code Oracle & Tireless Rubber Duck — AI pair programmer, responsible for writing the boring parts so humans don't have to.

Contributions are welcome — see the Contributing page.

Copyrights

FOSSIL is distributed under a multi-licensing system:

Use case	License
FOSS projects	GPL v3
Closed source / commercial	BSD 2-Clause
Closed source / commercial	BSD 3-Clause
Closed source / commercial	MIT

Anyone interested in using, developing, or contributing to FOSSIL is welcome — pick the license that best fits your needs.