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.
Transcript
cool. If
you're familiar with Shad CN, they are like a UI library for React, but they also have ShadCN charts. Well, all of those charts have now been implemented in Tanstack charts. So if you do spin up a project, all of the charts that you're familiar with are already there for you to use, as well as a lot of extra stuff. The cool thing about this is it supports all the frameworks. You can see the dropdown menu. We've got React, Preact, View, Angular, Solid, Svelte, and Mini Vanilla, and many others. So that's the cool thing about this versus something like Shad CN, which is very like React-centric. You can use this with pretty much any framework. And so yeah, check it out. You can head to the examples page and they have all kinds of different charts you can 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.
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 charting libraries out there, but there isn't as much in terms of like fully, fully, fully chart libraries like D3 straight up. So
definitely cool
about this. Yeah, very, very stoked on this. Yeah.
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 instead. So yeah, good stuff. So yeah, that's all I got. Check it out. Try it out. What do you have for us, Scott?
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