[OSM-dev] Rantings about API 0.6

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote:
> Geez, this conversation is making me want to rewrite the API from scratch in 
> another language.

What shall I say... if you travel a few hundred kilometres 
North-North-East you'll reach a little country with lots of malcontent 
but well-funded mappers who are happily hacking away at the future of 
OSM. I think they're running MonetDB.

No honestly, I firmly believe that the full API will one day be done in 
C/C++. I hear the map call has already been reimplemented in C++ to big 
performance gains and my assumption is that it is only a matter of time 
until we see that in production use, followed slowly but steadily be 
re-implementations of all but the most seldom-used API calls.

I would not be surprised if we had a mixed C/C++ and Rails production 
environment, with Rails being used for the more esoteric calls or new 
additions, and C/C++ for the parts that must be efficient (and that 
don't get changed every day).

Bye
Frederik