Chart.js is a widely-used charting library for JavaScript developers, boasting approximately 60,000 GitHub stars and around 2,400,000 weekly npm downloads as of October 2023. It not only provides default chart types with a variety of plugins, configurations, and animations but also offers numerous additional community-maintained chart types. Furthermore, it is possible to combine several chart types into a mixed chart.
In addition to its well-maintained, easy-to-use, and out-of-the-box functionalities, Chart.js offers two compelling advantages that users appreciate: a developer-friendly experience and high performance.
For developer experience, Chart.js includes built-in TypeScript typings and is compatible with React, Vue, Svelte, and Angular. Furthermore, Chart.js offers comprehensive documentation, an extensive API reference, and a variety of examples. Developers can also find numerous solved questions on Stack Overflow tagged with chart.js.
For performance, Chart.js renders chart elements on an HTML5 canvas instead of as SVG, which can require managing thousands of SVG nodes in the DOM tree. This approach makes Chart.js well-suited for handling large datasets, even without the need for data parsing and normalization. Additionally, developers have the option to implement data decimation to sample the dataset and reduce the chart’s size before rendering. Chart.js also supports tree-shaking, allowing you to further reduce the bundle size.
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