Why another plotting library?
JavaScript has no shortage of plotting libraries. But scientific computing needs more than a way to render charts, so we're building a plotting system designed around the entire workflow.
Athan is a software engineer at Quansight and core developer of stdlib.
JavaScript does not suffer from a shortage of ways to draw a chart. There are mature libraries for quick statistical graphics, dashboards, bespoke data-driven documents, publication-quality figures, and nearly every use case in between. Some are small and focused. Others are entire ecosystems in their own right.
So, naturally, stdlib is building another one.
At first glance, this may look like a textbook case of not-invented-here. It is not. We are not building a plotting library because we think the existing libraries are bad. Quite the opposite: JavaScript has some of the best visualization tooling of any programming ecosystem. We are building one because stdlib is trying to solve a different