[OSRM-talk] Project OSRM v0.3.8 released

[Dennis Luxen]

Dear OSRM community,

I am happy to announce the release of v0.3.8 of OSRM, which is mostly a bug fix and stability release. The release is the result of hard work of all contributors. It comes at a hefty count of 278 commits and is now available on GitHub [1]. The shortened changelog is this:

- Fix performance regression in JSON generation
- Update and enhance test suite
- Activate link time optimizations
- Update speed profiles to be more realistic
- CMake now adds RPATH info to executables
- Refactored some code for better readability
- Removed pesky function ptr from CRC32 computation
- Enhanced feedback on command line options
- Escape characters in JSON instead of HTML-entetizing
- Decode URI-encoded requests
- Fix a possible path quality regression
- General support for non-X86(-64) targets, e.g. Raspberry Pi
- Remove remaining C-style function calls
- Fix minor GPX export issue
- Fix resource leak, coverity issue #1121924
- Generate pkgconfig file
- Compile and install libOSRM as static lib
- Lint removal in CMakeLists.txt
- Refactor perpendicular projection to nearest location
- Untangling includes to cut down compile time
- More precise line generalizations
- Make nearest neighbor queries more efficient
- And many, many more smaller and bigger changes

This release lays the foundation for exciting changes under development right now that will culminate in a v0.3.9 release within the next few weeks. I'd like to personally thank all contributors and supporters at this point who have made this possible. Great work, everyone! Several hundred thousand queries have been served using this revision already on our main demo site [2] and public API [3].

There are also a couple of further things moving in the OSRM universe.

- The next release will bring major performance and memory usage improvements. 
- Please note, that we will switch to C++11 with the 0.4.0 release following the availability of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which is the main development platform.
- Our public API server is now serving https/SSL requests to better protect user privacy. Encryption is or will be rolled out at all our web estates in due time.
- We believe in extensive testing of code. Our Jenkins CI server at http://jenkins.project-osrm.org is now generating code and performance metrics for each and every commit to develop branch. This is done in addition to Travis CI.

Thanks again, everyone. And if you are coming to SOTM.us next week, we hope to see you there.

--Dennis on behalf of Team OSRM

[1] https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM
[2] http://map.project-osrm.org
[3] https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM/wiki/Server-api