Scott Tolinski Teaches JavaScript and front-end development through Level Up Tutorials, a video course platform, and brings that hands-on teaching angle to conversations about...

“D3 sucks to use and having a wrapper around it is way better.”

Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026

Tolinski had been digging through the TanStack Charts source to work out what it was built on, and found D3 packages underneath. The line is his answer to the obvious follow-up, which is why bother with a wrapper at all. He has been making charting-library tutorials for years, so it is a verdict from someone who has spent a great deal of time in D3 itself.

Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · 2026-08-24 Listen to the episode → More from Scott Tolinski → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) Around 11:35 into the episode

Scott Tolinski

cool. If

CJ Reynolds

…dial into. You can get the example code to start from. So I thought this was slick. I've used a lot of chart libraries in my day and a lot of them are missing some things or don't work the way that I want them to. This seems to have a lot and it's just in pre-alpha. So I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Scott Tolinski

I was trying to see a little bit of like what this is based on because a lot of charting libraries aren't just like built from scratch. And I did find in the charts core package a lot of D3 stuff, D3, Ray, D3, Force, Geo, HexBit. So it does seem like it is D3 based. And anybody who might be wondering, like, why not just use D3? D3 sucks to use and having a wrapper around it is way better. So yeah, I love a good charting library. I've been doing like charting library tutorials for a long time. So having Tanstack do a charts that's a D3 wrapper, it appears if someone out there works on Tanstack and wants to correct me, it does seem like it is D3 based. That's great for me. Yeah, I'm very happy with this because there's, and I will say, there are some really wonderful Svelte…

CJ Reynolds

definitely cool

Scott Tolinski

about this. Yeah, very, very stoked on this. Yeah.

CJ Reynolds

And no issue with being based on D3. I mean, I think that gives you a lot of the fundamentals without having to do everything from scratch. And plus, if that is the case, there's probably a lot of D3 style visualizations that you could throw an AI AI at to kind of adapt to use Tanstack charts…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski)

“A lot of these companies will approach you and say, hey, do you want early access? And we're like, yes, please. Free tokens and early access. I'm all over that. And people are afraid to soil that relationship by actually saying what it really is, because then they don't get access next time. Same thing happens with iPhone as well. There's all these iPhone reviewers that only say good stuff and kiss Apple's butt all day long because they're afraid of getting their access revoked.” — Wes Bos, Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski)

“My take on it is that Bun spelled the end of Deno because Deno was the alternative to Node… But it wasn't better enough. Bun came out and Bun's just like, we're fast. We're going to put SQLite in this thing. We're going to start shoving in whatever the heck we want… You got the safe choice, which is Node. You got the crazy choice, which is Bun. And then it's like, okay, I guess I'll pick Deno because it's a little bit better than Node.” — Scott Tolinski, Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski)