I recently gave a talk about my experiences with the C++ Catch Unit Test Framework at our local C++ user group. The slides and video from the talk (in German) are now available on my website.

Over the last months I have been busy working on a project for Mapbox. As part of that project I have spent a lot of time improving Osmium. And not just a few changes here or there but a more or less complete redesign based on the experience of developing and using Osmium for the last nearly three years now.

Osmium has had support for assembling multipolygons from relations for a long time. But the code had been lifted from an earlier Geofabrik project and was rather messy, hard to extend, and it contained several memory leaks. In the last month or so I finally chewed through the whole thing bit by bit and made it prettier.

I have done some long-overdue refactoring of the Osmium code which simplifies Osmium itself and simplifies its use. And should make it faster to compile, because only those parts that are really needed are included.

Osmium is getting bigger and bigger and doing more and more. But testing the code is still done manually and ad-hoc. Not good. I have used some testing frameworks in other languages, but never in C++. As usual, Boost comes to the rescue. I recently added some test code using the Boost Unit Test Framework which (at least for now) does all I need.

Some month ago I introduced Taginfo and mentioned there in passing that the statistics collection is done based on a C++ framework called Osmium. I promised another post and I am delivering on this promise now. I have been working on Osmium on and off over the last 6 months or so and, while it is far from perfect, I think it could be actually useful for other people now. So lets dive right in. What is Osmium and what is it good for?