OxiGDAL 0.1.2 Released — PMTiles v3 Writer, Geometry Operations, and a Unified Conversion API

The Pure Rust GDAL gains a vector-tile writer and a proper geometry toolkit.

Today we released OxiGDAL 0.1.2 — a feature release that adds PMTiles v3 writing, a complete geometry validation-and-operations module, and a unified conversion API on the umbrella crate.

No C. No C++. No Fortran. No PROJ/GEOS system libraries. No build hell, no 1 GB Docker images — just memory-safe geospatial processing that compiles to a single static binary or a sub-1 MB WASM bundle and runs everywhere.

Why OxiGDAL 0.1.2 is a meaningful step

GDAL has historically pushed vector-tile generation and geometry predicates out to a constellation of separate tools (tippecanoe, GEOS, shapely). OxiGDAL pulls them in-tree, in Pure Rust. With this release the workspace has grown to 76 crates (~540K Rust SLoC) and ships 15 format drivers — adding COPC/LAS, GeoPackage, MBTiles, and PMTiles to the original eleven — with 10,935 passing tests (45 skipped, 0 failures) backing it.

The headline additions:

• A PMTiles v3 writer — single-file, cloud-friendly vector-tile archives with Hilbert-curve tile ordering and content deduplication.
• A geometry operations module with the predicates and measures you actually reach for: centroid, area, perimeter, point-in-polygon, simplification, and convex hull.
• A unified oxigdal umbrella that detects 12 dataset formats and plans conversions between them through one API.

Technical Deep Dive: what changed under the hood

1. PMTiles v3 writer (oxigdal-pmtiles) PmTilesBuilder provides a simple add_tile / build flow. Internally it encodes tile IDs along a Hilbert curve (hilbert.rs), serializes directories with LEB128 varints (varint.rs), and deduplicates identical tiles by FNV-1a hash before writing the PMTiles v3 header and directory structure. The result is a single, range-request-friendly archive that drops straight onto S3 or any static host.

2. Geometry validation & operations (oxigdal-index) A new validation.rs surfaces seven ValidationIssue variants — unclosed ring, self-intersection, wrong hole orientation, and more — while operations.rs adds centroid, Shoelace area, perimeter, ray-casting point-in-polygon, Douglas–Peucker simplification, Graham-scan convex hull, is_convex, distance, and bounding-box helpers. It is the geometry toolkit that vector pipelines need, without a GEOS link.

3. Umbrella crate integration (oxigdal) The top-level crate adds seven feature-gated re-exports (gpkg, pmtiles, mbtiles, copc, index, noalloc, services) and a new convert.rs with DatasetFormat detection across 12 formats, a ConversionPlan, and can_convert / supported_conversions queries — so one dependency exposes the whole stack.

4. Refactoring for maintainability Two large modules were split to honor the 2,000-line ceiling with zero breaking changes: the 1,981-line ogc_features.rs in oxigdal-services became seven focused modules, and the 1,873-line epsg.rs in oxigdal-proj became five.

Getting Started

cargo add oxigdal

Open any supported dataset through the unified entry point:

use oxigdal::Dataset;

fn main() -> oxigdal::Result<()> {
    let dataset = Dataset::open("world.tif")?;
    println!("Format : {}", dataset.format());
    println!("Size   : {}x{}", dataset.width(), dataset.height());
    println!("CRS    : {}", dataset.crs().name());
    Ok(())
}

Or drive format conversion straight from the CLI:

oxigdal convert input.shp output.fgb

What’s New in 0.1.2

• PMTiles v3 writer (oxigdal-pmtiles) — PmTilesBuilder with add_tile/build, Hilbert tile IDs, LEB128 varint directories, and FNV-1a content dedup.
• Geometry validation & operations (oxigdal-index) — 7 validation issue types plus centroid, area, perimeter, point-in-polygon, Douglas–Peucker simplify, convex hull, and distance/bbox helpers.
• Umbrella conversion API (oxigdal) — DatasetFormat detection for 12 formats, ConversionPlan, can_convert, supported_conversions, and three new format variants (PMTiles, MBTiles, Copc).
• New subcrate READMEs for oxigdal-copc, -geojson, -gpkg, -index, -mbtiles, -noalloc, and -pmtiles.
• Refactors — ogc_features.rs (1,981 lines → 7 modules) and epsg.rs (1,873 lines → 5 modules), zero breaking changes.
• Clippy fix (oxigdal-netcdf) — renamed CfVersion::from_str → parse_version and CellMethodName::from_str → parse_method to avoid std::str::FromStr confusion.

Tips

• Build vector tiles without leaving Rust. PmTilesBuilder::add_tile followed by build gives you a single PMTiles archive — no tippecanoe, no Node toolchain. Because tiles are deduplicated by content hash, repeated or empty tiles cost nothing on disk.
• Validate before you write. Run geometries through oxigdal-index’s validation.rs to catch unclosed rings and self-intersections up front, rather than discovering them downstream in a renderer.
• Pick the right tile container. 0.1.2 ships both MBTiles and PMTiles drivers; prefer PMTiles when you want range-request reads from object storage with no database engine in the loop.
• Let the umbrella plan conversions. Use supported_conversions and can_convert to discover valid format pairs programmatically before committing to a ConversionPlan.
• Enable only what you need. The new re-exports (gpkg, pmtiles, copc, index, …) are all feature-gated, keeping default builds small.

This is the foundation

OxiGDAL is the geospatial layer of the COOLJAPAN Pure Rust ecosystem, and 0.1.2 keeps every byte of it C-free. PMTiles archives are written through OxiArc compression, binary serialization uses OxiCode, numerical building blocks come from SciRS2-Core, and S3-compatible storage is reached via the RS3GW gateway — no zip, no flate2, no bincode anywhere in the default closure.

Repository: https://github.com/cool-japan/oxigdal

Star the repo if you want vector tiles and geometry operations without the C++ toolchain.

Pure Rust cloud-native geospatial is here — fast, safe, and sovereign.

— KitaSan at COOLJAPAN OÜ March 17, 2026