You work for Mapbox, a US-based company with offices around the world.
Do you still perform your day-to-day work? How's the relationship with your colleagues these days? I'm curious about the people in Belarus in particular.
Indeed!
From my point of view, WebGL rendering for Leaflet makes sense, but it's very important to not remove support for browsers which don't implement WebGL right now.
MapboxGL is very performant, but it changes all the abstractions to the map elements, which is something I'm particularly not very happy with. Thus Leaflet.GL.
Leaflet maintainer here. AFAIK, Leaflet still has a nicer learning curve compared to OpenLayers (which doesn't affect long-term OL users like you, obviously), and a plugin ecosystem which allows for smaller library size.
The OL3 folks have been working hard on making OL3 leaner (see the "Faster, smaller, better" talk from FOSS4G Bonn here: http://video.foss4g.org/foss4g2016/videos/index.html), but I feel Leaflet still has an edge on that regard.
Also, OL3 depended on the Closure compiler for a long time, which made it difficult to interoperate with other frameworks, which is why a lot of React/Ractive/R/Django/Vue users choose Leaflet.
Other than that, there's no clear obvious advantage of a library over the other one. We have a friendly relationship with the OL3 folks, we try to copy some of their features, they try to copy some of ours, everything gets better in the end.
Leaflet maintainer here. There is some work on a rotation code branch, plus I've been working on something called "Leaflet.GL" to do WebGL rendering. The OL3 folks just have more time and resources, you know. Also Leaflet must still work with IE8 (OL3 doesn't, there are some cases where that's needed).
We have a friendly relationship with the OL3 folks, even though sometimes we're jealous of their WebGL rendering, and sometimes they're jealous of our lower learning curve.
Do you still perform your day-to-day work? How's the relationship with your colleagues these days? I'm curious about the people in Belarus in particular.