We present the main algorithmic and design choices that have been made to represent complexes and compute persistent homology in the Gudhi library. The Gudhi library (Geometric Understanding in Higher Dimensions) is a generic C++ library for computational topology. Its goal is to provide robust, efficient, flexible and easy to use implementations of state-of-the-art algorithms and data structures for computational topology. We present the different components of the software, their interaction and the user interface. We justify the algorithmic and design decisions made in Gudhi and provide benchmarks for the code. The software, which has been developed by the first author, is available at project.inria.fr/gudhi/software/