Hacker News Reader

Comment by icholy | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare with openlayers?

Mapbox GL/MapLibre GL does one thing and does it incredibly well: vector map rendering from tiled data (MVT format) in the common Web Mercator projection.

OpenLayers is a bit more of a Swiss Army knife. It's a valuable part of many web GIS workflows, but its vector tile rendering is a long way behind MBGL's.

I've tried very recently with Openlayers and their OL-Mapbox style package[0] - it wasn't too bad TBH, but not great.

Maplibre is still very nascent and needs a lot of work until it is ready to be used in anger. I do wonder if it would be better to put effort into Openlayers rather than trying to maintain this library - as others have pointed out, OL provides so much more.

[0]: https://github.com/openlayers/ol-mapbox-style

Last time I tried, Mapbox is very primitive as a GIS front end but fine as a basic Web mapping UI.

I find that Openlayers has more of the capabilities I need when building complex mapping UIs.

Exactly the opposite experience.

Openlayers Web GL suppot is rudimentary.

Maplibre is certainly weak in the "GIS front" like coordinate transformation or WMS stuff etc.

But yes, the one big feature missing in openlayers is Web GL support for vector tiles. There was some support for this but due to bugs (or something else?) they removed it in the latest version. Note that openlayers has Web GL support for e.g. point cloud.

I do wish Openlayers did WebGL better but I found Mapbox to be far too primitive to do anything beyond your basic map views and interactions.

Once I got to "user has to author their own city data on a dozen layers" it was missing a lot of authoring features required.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com