1.6 … and what Gmsh is not so good at

Due to its historical background and limited developer manpower, Gmsh has also some (a lot of?) weaknesses:

• the b-rep approach for describing geometries can become inconvenient for complex models;
• there is no support for Nurbs and only very limited support for trimmed surfaces in Gmsh's scripting language (however you can import STEP or IGES models with such features when Gmsh is built with OpenCascade support);
• Gmsh is not primarily a structured mesh generator: no automatic quadrilateral or hexahedral meshing algorithm is provided. If you want quadrangles, you have to use transfinite or extruded meshes or recombine unstructured triangular meshes. For hexahedra, your only choice is transfinite or extruded meshes;
• Gmsh is not a multi-bloc generator: all meshes produced by Gmsh are conforming in the sense of finite element meshes;
• Gmsh was designed to solve academic “test cases”, not industrial-size problems. You may find that Gmsh is too slow for large problems (with thousands of geometric primitives, or millions of mesh/post-processing elements).

If you have the skills and some free time, feel free to join the project! We gladly accept any code contributions (see section Programming notes) to remedy the aforementioned (and all other) shortcomings...