This paper describes an Essential Software Framework for Meshfree Methods (ESFM). Through thorough analyses of many existing meshfree methods, their common elements and procedures are identified, and a general procedure is formulated into ESFM that can facilitate their implementations and accelerate new developments in meshfree methods. ESFM also modulates performance-critical components such as neighbor-point searching, sparse-matrix storage, and sparse-matrix solver enabling developed meshfree analysis programs to achieve high-performance. ESFM currently consists of 21 groups of classes and 94 subclasses, and more algorithms can be easily incorporated into ESFM. Finally, ESFM provides a common ground to compare various meshfree methods, enabling detailed analyses of performance characteristics. 
ESFM: An Essential Software Framework for Meshfree Methods