Comment by trjordan
2 days ago
Man, my first startup in 2010 used protovis, the charting library Mike Bostock built before deciding d3 was the better approach. It was rough to have an 8 month old startup with a core piece of tech that suddenly stopped improving.
My main takeaway from so much of this is that "just a chart" is one of the biggest sources of hidden complexity in displaying useful information to people. It's right up there with "a simple web form" and "a web page with some simple interactivity."
Everybody has a wildly different idea of what good looks like. Defaults will never be right. Personal and global taste changes annually. We clown react (rightly) for constantly reinventing the same 4 wheels, but customers gleefully use new stuff all the time.
It's kind of amazing that d3 has been so durable in the frontend world. It really is a wrapper over a pretty solid approach. And yeah, that approach is complex, but that's the reality of visualization. It's hard to imagine another one that's that good.
I've worked a lot with dataviz over the years, and after fighting so many libraries, I've finally stabilised at plain d3. Even in React projects, I'll just use the d3 primitives and build SVG from that (ignoring all the d3 DOM stuff)
All other libraries will just have a pile of abstractions that will leak everywhere as soon as you deviate from the happy path.
If you just want a bunch of auxillary charts and don't need a ton of control, just use something like ECharts. When you want real creative control over your visualisations, don't bother with anything high level.
I like d3 and echarts. Everything else feels a bit hacky.
I tried for a few years to help Streamlit deployments in production. Never will go that direction again. Litestar + React with echarts or d3 is the way to go. Or use your favorite application backend, but REST is almost certainly the way your use case needs to go.
echarts is great. I like Highcharts too
Trading view charting_library is a nightmare. D3 is a pain to learn, but unmatched.
> a core piece of tech that suddenly stopped improving.
I just had this happen to me with something I had invested considerable time into. I've finally found a workaround, and even leveraged some of the previous tech, but man it sucks to have something just become abandonned. All the more reason to choose boring tech when you can...
No fun to have to do a panic migration!
Anyway my latest startup is trying to make AI do migrations, in no small part because of this problem 15 years ago.