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Comment by hienyimba

19 hours ago

Right on time.

We’ve been working on a browser-based Link Graph (osint) analysis tool for months now (https://webvetted.com/workbench). The graph charting tools on the market are pretty basic for the kind of charting we are looking to do (think 1000s of connected/disconnected nodes/edges. Being able to handle 1M points is a dream.

This will come in very handy.

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hienyimba

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huntergemmer  19 hours ago

That's a cool project! Just checked out the workbench. I should be upfront though: ChartGPU is currently focused on traditional 2D charts (line, bar, scatter, candlestick, etc.), not graph/network visualization with nodes and edges. That said, the WebGPU rendering patterns would translate well to force-directed graphs. The scatter renderer already handles thousands of instanced points - extending that to edges wouldn't be a huge leap architecturally.

Is graph visualization something you'd want as part of ChartGPU, or would a separate "GraphGPU" type library make more sense? Curious how you're thinking about it.

  • agentcoops  18 hours ago

    Really fantastic work! Can't wait to play around with your library. I did a lot of work on this at a past job long ago and the state of JS tooling was so inadequate at the time we ended up building an in-house Scala visualization library to pre-render charts...

    More directly relevant, I haven't looked at the D3 internals for a decade, but I wonder if it might be tractable to use your library as a GPU rendering engine. I guess the big question for the future of your project is whether you want to focus on the performance side of certain primitives or expand the library to encompass all the various types of charts/customization that users might want. Probably that would just be a different project entirely/a nightmare, but if feasible even for a subset of D3 you would get infinitely customizable charts "for free." https://github.com/d3/d3-shape might be a place to look.

    In my past life, the most tedious aspect of building such a tool was how different graph standards and expectations are across different communities (data science, finance, economics, natural sciences, etc). Don't get me started about finance's love for double y-axis charts... You're probably familiar with it, but https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computing... is fantastic if you continue on your own path chart-wise and you're looking for inspiration.

    • huntergemmer  17 hours ago

      Thanks - and great question about direction. My current thinking: Focus on performance-first primitives for the core library. The goal is "make fast charts easy" not "make every chart possible." There are already great libraries for infinite customization (D3, Observable Plot) - but they struggle at scale.

      That said, the ECharts-style declarative API is intentionally designed to be "batteries included" for common cases. So it's a balance: the primitives are fast, but you get sensible defaults for the 80% use case without configuring everything. Double y-axis is a great example - that's on the roadmap because it's so common in finance and IoT dashboards. Same with annotations, reference lines, etc. Haven't read the Grammar of Graphics book but it's been on my list - I'll bump it up. And d3-shape is a great reference for the path generation patterns. Thanks for the pointers!

      Question: What chart types or customization would be most valuable for your use cases?

      3 replies →

lmeyerov  10 hours ago

You may enjoy Graphistry (eg, pygraphistry, GraphistryJS), where our users regularly do 1M+ graph elements interactively, such as for event & entity data. Webgl frontend, GPU server backend for layouts too intense for frontend. We have been working on stability over the last year with large-scale rollout users (esp cyber, IT, social, finance, and supply chain), and now working on the next 10X+ of visual scaling. Python version: https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry . It includes many of the various tricks mentioned here, like GPU hitmapping, and we helped build various popular libs like apache arrow for making this work end-to-end :)

Most recently adding to the family is our open source GFQL graph language & engine layer (cypher on GPUs, including various dataframe & binary format support for fast & easy large data loading), and under the louie.ai umbrella, piloting genAI extensions

wesammikhail  18 hours ago

my 2 cents: I'm one of these people that could possibly use your tool. However, the website doesnt give me much info. I'd urge you to add some more pages that showcase the product and what it can do with more detail. Would help capture more people imo.