In this article, we discuss an approach for geometry and topology optimization of structures which benefits from an accurate description of shapes at each stage of the iterative process - by means of a mesh amenable for mechanical analyses - while retaining the whole versatility of the level set method when it comes to accounting for their evolution. The key ingredients of this method are two operators for switching from a meshed representation of a domain to an implicit one, and conversely; this notably brings into play an algorithm for generating the signed distance function to an arbitrary discrete domain, and a mesh generation algorithm for implicitly-defined geometries.