November 3, 2025
Hex drama, Rust karma
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust
Rust rewrite of Uber’s hex map gets cheers, side‑eye, and speed flexes
TLDR: A Rust rewrite of Uber’s hex mapping tool claims big speed gains across hundreds of tests, with a few slow spots. Comments split between “stick to the official” skeptics and excited Rust/WebAssembly fans, while the author says it’s now even faster—making this a hot pick for web‑friendly geospatial work.
If you missed the Daft Punk nod, here’s the gist: h3o is a Rust rebuild of Uber’s hex‑based map system (think: slicing Earth into tiny honeycomb tiles to power ride‑share, logistics, and geospatial apps). The dev claims huge speed wins—out of 911 benchmarks, 862 favored h3o, with some tests clocking up to 10x+ faster. A few hiccups pop up around the infamous “pentagon” cells, which only adds to the meme‑fuel: the Hex Cult vs the Pentagon Panic.
The comments turned into a mini culture war. One camp is loyal to the official C library: “not switching,” citing trust and stability. The other camp is yelling browser power, saying Rust makes it easier to run in WebAssembly (code that runs safely in your browser). Then came the flex: a data nerd bragged h3o ran 5x faster than DuckDB’s C++ in their setup and dropped bindings for the Polars data tool with a shiny link. Meanwhile, a skeptic asked, “who even uses this besides Uber?” sparking a quick primer on geospatial hype.
Plot twist: the author showed up, laughing that the blog is old and the code got even faster after a geometry overhaul. Cue the crowd: new blog post when? And yes, the Daft Punk memes wrote themselves.
Key Points
- •h3o is a full Rust rewrite of the H3 library, not a binding, aiming for safer APIs, WASM integration, and full H3 4.0 API coverage.
- •A comprehensive differential test suite (756 tests), 166 integration tests (including GeoJSON helpers), 42 unit tests, and 15 fuzz targets validate h3o.
- •Benchmarks with 911 cases show h3o outperforming H3 in 862 tests, with speedups ranging up to and beyond 10x in some cases.
- •H3 retains advantages in 44 tests, mainly at coarse resolutions, with notable slower cases for h3o in pentagon-related conversions at class III resolutions.
- •Optimizations include lookup tables for child counts and improvements in cellToBoundary; tools and commands are provided to reproduce benchmarks.