  This paper summarizes the development of Veamy, an object-oriented C++
library for the virtual element method (VEM) on general polygonal meshes, whose
modular design is focused on its extensibility. The linear elastostatic and
Poisson problems in two dimensions have been chosen as the starting stage for
the development of this library. The theory of the VEM, upon which Veamy is
built, is presented using a notation and a terminology that resemble the
language of the finite element method (FEM) in engineering analysis. Several
examples are provided to demonstrate the usage of Veamy, and in particular, one
of them features the interaction between Veamy and the polygonal mesh generator
PolyMesher. A computational performance comparison between VEM and FEM is also
conducted. Veamy is free and open source software.
