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Comment by boomskats | Hacker News Reader

We paid a lot of cash for Highcharts (Highstock actually) a couple of years ago as an up-front investment for a process manager we were building - an OEM licence. This was about a month's salary, straight after I quit my FT job. The product is now ready to go live almost three years later, and there still isn't a charting library, free or otherwise, that offers us the same functionality that this did back when we licenced it.

Not to mention the fact that the CTO himself will fix bugs for you within a week or so if you ask him nicely. Great company and great model. I don't get how people can complain about the fact it costs money. The costs are passed on to your client who will gladly pay for a better product, and you're supporting the ecosystem. I'd have paid double what we paid.

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I don't think the problem is that highcharts costs money, but that there are no good FOSS alternatives(I embarked on a fairly extensive search last week for a FOSS js charting libraries and although I did end up choose one of those for the project, it was not nearly as fleshed out as Highcharts). One thing that tends to happen when you have a very strong commercial library out there, is it often discourages the creation of a FOSS alternative, which is somewhat unfortunate.

FOSS is one of the great enablers of modern software engineering and FOSS is far from "gimme software for free and I give you nothing, thanks!" type situation that some people make it out to be.

It seems like a big contributor to this problem is that the culture of FOSS is largely hostile to paying for software, even if its source is open and modifiable (but probably not re-distributable). I don't much about this, but I would love to make open source libraries or application that I can sell licenses for, but I'm not very optimistic it would work, and I'm not completely sure why it shouldn't.

I don't think it's specifically paying for things, it's just developers don't like arbitrary restrictions put on something they rely on. And however you look at it, pricing and pricing structures are essentially arbitrary.

Can you comment on highcharts performance?

It looks like highcharts uses SVG under the covers. Canvas based visualizations may fare a little better than SVGs once you're trying to render thousands of data points.

I can. Well, on HighStock, but it's basically the same. With a couple tweaks (not really related to performance but possibly helping), it was incredibly performant except on some versions of IE. It came down to the performance of the javascript engine in the browser, and the bottleneck wasn't SVG but rather various calculations on the data to make it suitable for display. We had many thousands of points (up to a few series of up to 1 year of 15-minute meter data) and were doing aggregation client-side as well.

SVG performance degrades based on the amount of data that you are drawing. If you are rendering basic charts you will never run into any issues, if you are doing scatterplots with thousands of points or some other visualization with lots of separate nodes then you run into performance issues.

Canvas performance is limited by the size of the canvas, the larger the canvas, the more time it takes to redraw it.

SVG lets you tie into the DOM and DOM manipulation methods allowing for simple event interactions. Interactive canvas can be done but is more time consuming and difficult, though there are now canvas charting libraries that provide you with some basic "click" or even "hover" functionality.

I used highstock to plot thousands of points and it eated lime it was nothing . If you want speed , this is for you

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