May 6, 2022
maplibre-rs is an upcoming and cross-platform vector map renderer written in Rust. If you want to get in touch with the developers visit the #maplibre:matrix.org chat or our Slack at osmus.slack.com.
📰 News
About one month ago, the MapLibre organisation started to host the maplibre-rs project (formerly known as mapr). I was happy about the opportunity and the support from the Geo community. It seems like I was not the first with the idea of a map rendering engine in Rust. In the discussion #18 a lot of people showed what they have been working on in the past.
The maplibre-rs project is the place where we can bundle our efforts to create a new, unique and fun rendering engine.
At about the same time, researchers form the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HES-SO/HEIG-VD), Switzerland, approached the maplibre-rs project. The maplibre-rs implementation should serve as a proof of concept to show that a true cross-platform experience is possible with WebGPU and Rust.
I’m looking forward what we will create in the following year!
🏠 Housekeeping
The following will summarizes what happened last week on GitHub.
🎁 New Features
- #13, #33 Add support for Gradle
It’s not possible to easily use maplibre-rs on Android. Sadly only fullscreen is supported right now.
- #15 Add support for XCode and Swift Packages
It’s not possible to easily use maplibre-rs on iOS and macOS. Sadly only fullscreen is supported right now.
- #43 Create a proper web package
It’s not possible to easily use maplibre-rs on the web via an NPM package.
- #46 Prepare for publishing on crates.io
Some preparations are finished and maplibre-rs is available here
- #38 optimize zoom bounds
Computing some coordinates is faster now.
- #63 Move platform specific code to web
Most of the web related stuff lives now in the web crates and no longer in the core crate maplibre.
🔧 Fixes
📄 Documentation
- #52 Add packaging Documentation
- #54 Improve the MacOS documentation
🧵 Current Discussions
- #18 Looking forward
What’s up in the mapping community?
- #32 Should the map be controlled from rust or from higher level languages?
Input handling of maplibre-rs.
- #49 Introduce yourself!
Who are you?
Some architectural discussions:
- #75 Usage of bevy game engine
- #60 Requirement of cross-origin isolated
- #83 Potential memory allocation issues on WASM
👋 New Contributors
- @Drabble: Thanks, for working on the documentation and testing maplibre-rs on different platforms!
- @FabianWildgrube: Thanks for experimenting with text rendering!
- @nyurik: Thanks, for reviews and optimizations!
- @drwestco: Thanks, for the awesome new logo for maplibre-rs!
- @vladdoster, @hdevalence: Thanks for improving the documentation!