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We end up using some of the d3 helpers, like on axis & scales, but go straight to chart libraries + custom DOM/SVG/webgl for the rest, and normal React framewor

We end up using some of the d3 helpers, like on axis & scales, but go straight to chart libraries + custom DOM/SVG/webgl for the rest, and normal React framework for interactivity. The d3 functional helpers are still real gems and IMO under-appreciated. I think it was rewritten a few years to help expose those better (e.g., for tree shaking.) As soon as you go to react & friends, most of the d3 model does become redundant, and Yet Another Thing to burden the team. There's still a temptation to reuse beautiful d3 gallery items posted by others, but generally, they're annoying to patch up & now you must maintain them. Better to use dedicated maintained libs if that's what you want. There have been attempts to do Standard D3 Chart libs, but afaict it's a graveyard of abandonware, and I approach most efforts here with strong caution. (The trend for the last few years has been each bigco to release their own NIH framework and then abandon as the authors leave, and little incentive for D3 design consultants to maintain old projects.)

sailfast 7y ago
What "straight chart libraries" do you use? I'd be interested in digging into that further. I agree that React / Redux state can take the place of a lot of the D3 models. That said, it's nice that D3 handles entry / updates and changes so you can point to redux and it "just works" and all the transitions, etc are handled as your app state is handled.
- lmeyerov 7y ago
  At this point... I think we only have Susie Lu (Netflix)'s annotator, but good chance of it being removed. For example, we had to do our own timeline to get decently fast zoom rebinning on modern screen widths that we abandoned a JS widget here, and histograms ended up being so custom that we'd get little from a library. The shortlist for GIS is DecKGL. Graphistry gets a lot of requests here, so we helped the DeckGL folks on some Arrow/GPU stuff and we had promising experiments as part of it, but (if I remember right) we hit memory issues and something else. We'll be evaluating that for GIS next time it makes sense. +1 to others on HighCharts team!
  - sailfast 7y ago
    Thanks - that makes total sense for a company that does this for a living, especially on GL for more scalable rendering. I'll also be checking out your product.

sailfast 7y ago

What "straight chart libraries" do you use? I'd be interested in digging into that further. I agree that React / Redux state can take the place of a lot of the D3 models. That said, it's nice that D3 handles entry / updates and changes so you can point to redux and it "just works" and all the transitions, etc are handled as your app state is handled.

lmeyerov 7y ago
At this point... I think we only have Susie Lu (Netflix)'s annotator, but good chance of it being removed. For example, we had to do our own timeline to get decently fast zoom rebinning on modern screen widths that we abandoned a JS widget here, and histograms ended up being so custom that we'd get little from a library. The shortlist for GIS is DecKGL. Graphistry gets a lot of requests here, so we helped the DeckGL folks on some Arrow/GPU stuff and we had promising experiments as part of it, but (if I remember right) we hit memory issues and something else. We'll be evaluating that for GIS next time it makes sense. +1 to others on HighCharts team!
- sailfast 7y ago
  Thanks - that makes total sense for a company that does this for a living, especially on GL for more scalable rendering. I'll also be checking out your product.