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maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
MapLibre GL JS - Interactive vector tile maps in the browser
MapLibre GL JS is a WebGL2-based vector tile map renderer for browsers, forked from mapbox-gl-js after Mapbox relicensed in 2020. It's the de facto open-source choice for anyone who needs Mapbox-quality maps without the Mapbox lock-in. Backed by Microsoft, AWS, and a healthy sponsor list, this is production-grade infrastructure, not an experiment.
GPU-accelerated rendering via WebGL2 means it handles millions of features without choking — the shader pipeline is sophisticated, with proper terrain, globe projection, and 3D extrusions. The fork has genuinely diverged from Mapbox rather than just tracking it: globe projection, WebGL2 migration, and the plugin ecosystem (react-map-gl, deck.gl integration) are all first-class. The test coverage is real — unit tests alongside the source files, CI that actually runs, and a codecov badge that isn't embarrassing. The migration guides (from Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox) lower the switching cost substantially.
The style specification is still fundamentally Mapbox's design, which means some quirks and limitations are inherited debt you can't easily fix without breaking everyone. The worker-thread architecture for tile parsing is correct but makes debugging painful — errors in tile processing are easy to lose in the postMessage chain. There's no built-in tile server; you're on your own for hosting vector tiles (PMTiles helps, but it's an external dependency). The GLSL shader files are large and hand-maintained — no shader compilation abstraction means touching the render pipeline requires understanding a lot of implicit state.