I know right! I'd never heard of HTTP Range requests until PMTiles - but gee it's an elegant solution.

Hadn't seen PMTiles before, but that matches the mental model exactly! I chose physical file sharding over Range Requests on a single db because it felt safer for 'dumb' static hosts like CF. - less risk of a single 22GB file getting stuck or cached weirdly. Maybe it would work

My only gripe is that the tile metadata is stored as JSON, which I get is for compatibility reasons with existing software, but for e.g. a simple C program to implement the full spec you need to ship a JSON parser on top of the PMTiles parser itself.

How would you store it?

A JSON parser is less than a thousand lines of code.

And where most of CPU time will be wasted in, if you care about profiling/improving responsiveness.

At that point you're just io bound, no? I can easily parse json at 100+GB/s on commodity hardware, but I'm gonna have a much harder time actually delivering that much data to parse.

What's a better way?