IfcPlusPlus

IFC++ or IfcPlusPlus is a C++ open source (MIT license) library from the IfcQuery project for reading, writing, and viewing IFC files.

The IFC++ library can be used for general purpose, and it also includes a sample IFC visualization application. This viewer is based on Qt 5 and OpenSceneGraph (OSG), and can load big IFC files very fast, and thus can be used to compare the performance of other free IFC viewers, like Blender and FreeCAD, which internally use the IfcOpenShell library.

Installation

The IFC++ distribution is provided as source code, so to use the library and the viewer, the code must be compiled.

Note: there is a more complete viewer that uses pre-compiled IFC++ libraries intended for Windows. This viewer is free for use but is not open source. It is available by downloading the SimpleViewerExampleQt.zip package from ifcquery.com, and running SimpleViewerExampleQt.exe. This viewer is self-contained, everything that it requires to run is included in the .zip archive.

To learn more about installing IFC++, visit the page in the FreeCAD wiki: IfcPlusPlus.