Recently, I needed a tool for rendering OSM data to images in a certain environment, where the types of software I could install was very limited. Most OSM rendering tools required a database or where in some other ways impractical to use. The one tool I could use in my environment was Maperitive, but it was closed source and buggy.
So I decided to make my own rendering engine, OSMRender, which is a command line tool that converts XML files to PDF, PNG or SVG files and tiles. It is a clone of Maperitive and uses the same rulesets and its output looks the same (although I needed to edit Maperitive’s default ruleset a lot to make it work for my purposes).
I’ll leave this here in case it is useful for anyone here. It’s not the greatest renderer but if you need a program that directly outputs images without intermediary steps or file formats, it does the job.