Do you recommend other ways to handle large uv mapping tasks with little manual work? In cases like lidar scans I definitely wouldn't be going for best quality, but just something to get the task done in a decent amount of time.

I will try doing this as my first issue, seems like a good way to familiarize myself with blender's C codebase. My plan is to port it straight to C and use the appropriate data structure to try and speed the process up.

I'll give an update in a couple of days on the progress.

Do we have any example of using 2d dynamic arrays using blender's BLI data structure libraries ?

I need it in order to port getUvIslands and packIslands

Meshroom uses different algorithms for UVing and it's open source. Maybe we could port those methods.

I think I managed to port most of the existing python algorithm to C. Just need to find a way to use existing functions to pack the UV islands and try out some edge cases.

I'll open up a diff once it's done

Here is the diff,
https://developer.blender.org/D8311

I'm still retaining the old operator in case someone wants to do an arc patch and compare. If you find any bugs or edge cases feel free to notify me