awesome-vector-tiles

https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker can generate vector tiles directly from *.osm.pbf files. Then serve the vector tiles with leaflet+mapbox-gl-leaflet, mapbox gl js, openlayers 3 or similar. https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles

It's certainly true that GL JS and Native never really got third-party contributors, and that the complexity of the task is a major reason; like you say, there aren't many GL hobby devs. Another reason is that they're simply great libraries and there hasn't been that much reason for anyone to contribute - I can only ever recall encountering one significant issue and it wasn't a showstopper. But there's more to it. When the roadmap of an open-source project is tightly controlled by a sponsor, that can make third-party contributions hard or impossible. I know OSRM much better than MBGL so I'll cite an example from that - the distance matrix issue. This is massive for many users, plays right to OSRM's strengths, but Mapbox wouldn't accept patches to provide it for _years_. IIRC it only got in when Mapbox's attention shifted to Valhalla. I'm

If you want to use vector maps you should also check out Mapbox GL JS. I use their tiles but can use other providers or generate and host your own, which I also do. I've been making spatial apps for probably 8 years now and moved from Google maps and Leaflet towards vector maps and I don't think I'd ever go back. https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles/

Vector tiling is still useful for dynamically simplifying dense maps from a single data set, so that a browser doesn't have to consume and process a few dozen MB of GeoJSON or what have you into SVG or canvas output, but TileMill isn't the tool for that either. Mapbox maintains a list of vector tile parsers and generators: https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles Also, map data is getting progressively richer and more expensive to render, particularly when adding 3D data, so I'm not convinced that offloading everything to the client is still a 90% use case.

There are a lot of things being written outside of Node currently [1]. However, a large number of the tools are in node, primarily because lots of people at Mapbox are using Node. However, most of these are backed by C++ libraries so the potential is there for lots of porting to different languages, other people simply need to build against them. Some of the non-Mapbox libraries are not as up to date with the specification, but they are getting much better! [1] https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles