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I guess greybeard knows better about computational geometry, yet, as a novice, I would do the next: sort all the rectangles by area. Then start layout them out from left to right to the top of the panel. When the first "row" is occupied, lay the next "row" from right to left, and so on.

I guess greybeard knows better about computational geometry, yet, as a novice, I would do the next: sort all the rectangles by area. Then start laying them out from left to right to the top of the panel. When the first "row" is occupied, lay the next "row" from right to left, and so on.

Bad advice 1

I guess greybeard knows better about computational geometry, yet, as a novice, I would do the next: sort all the rectangles by area. Then start layout them out from left to right to the top of the panel. When the first "row" is occupied, lay the next "row" from right to left, and so on.

Actually, I suspect that optimal layout minimizing the surrounding area is very hard to compute (NP-hard or something).

Not an algorithm review, but rather a review from software engineering point of view.