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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

It's too low level. For reference, I just re-implemented the entire thing in React. just react, with svg elements directly. Not using D3 at all. And it was roughly the same level of effort.

edit: saying that D3 was a terrible choice is not saying that D3 itself is terrible. D3 is amazing. But before choosing it, you should know exactly what it is, and whether it helps in your specific use case.

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I'm not sure how you'd implement scales, color theory, etc.. in React (a rendering library). There are a lot of useful parts of d3 which have nothing to do with rendering to the DOM. In fact, React and D3 complement each other quite well (maybe that is what you were saying?).

D3 is slightly more verbose than the one liners, but with that I get complete control over the scales and appearance of my chart. In addition it's trivial to combine multiple charts in a single diagram.

Out of interest, how did the performance compare between the React+SVG and D3 implementations? (and what sort of data size / structure were you working with?).

> D3 is amazing. But before choosing it, you should know exactly what it is, and whether it helps in your specific use case.

I agree. D3 is really great, but not always the most appropriate solution.

That's the idea when you're using D3 with React: React handles the DOM updates, D3 handles data wrangling and math. You said you reimplemented your charts in SVG directly – did you also reimplement scales, chart axis generation, d3-collections, d3-time, etc?

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