maplibre-rs weekly

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 join the MapLibre (#maplibre and #maplibre-rs) community within the OpenStreetMap Slack. You can get an invite here .

📰 News

If you haven’t read the initial news then check it out here . In the past week we continued to work on our collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HES-SO/HEIG-VD), Switzerland. The main focus of the past week was on documentation and redesigning the renderer and the structure of the maplibre-rs library.

In the past week, I extracted the render from Bevy . After some discussions #75 , Slack and Matrix we concluded that writing a renderer specific to maps is the best option. In general, specialized renderers can be optimized better. By implementing a renderer ourselves, we also stay independent of other projects. For example, Bevy is a render engine (renderer + a lot more) for games. That means that features which are important for bevy are most likely not important for maplibre-rs and vice versa. For example, the Bevy renderer does not support a stencil.

Because I’m quite unexperienced in the world of 3D graphics, I dediced to base the renderer on some existing one. The best renderers in the Rust world are currently Bevy and rend3. After evaluating both renderers I decided to go with the Bevy one, because rend3 had usages of `unsafe. Both renderers are based around the idea of a render graph .

🏠 Housekeeping

The following will summarizes what happened last week on GitHub.

🎁 New Features

#99 Postponed: Experimentally render to an Android surface
Experiment which renders to an Android Surface instead of the whole screen.
#93 Add Render Graph from Bevy , #94 Experiment: Render Graph from rend3
Experiment with a new render engine. This will probably define the architecture of maplibre.
#77 Postponed: Use only non-send futures
I’m not sure whether Futures should be Send or not.
#80 Refactor WebWorker pool
Restructure and optimize WebWorker pool.
#70 Experimentally add a headless mode
Experiment with a headless mode.
#85 Contributors README.md
#86 Move winit code to maplibre-winit
Extract winit dependency from main crate.

🔧 Fixes

#97 Initial start of removing unwrap from a Result type
Remove .unwrap() from code.
#88 Postponed: Inspect WASM size
Optimze WASM size.
#81 Update license and code of conduct

📄 Documentation

#84 Write the Microsoft Windows build documentation
#87 Improve the Cargo 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

@iakev - For resolving .unwrap()s in the code
@neimsaci - For adding contributors to the README

maplibre-rs weekly MapLibre