# XY charting library

12 Hacker News commenters recommended XY charting library and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Rust-backed charting library that reduces large datasets before rendering them with WebGL, praised for speed; critics find its companion language hard to grasp.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast on large datasets via WebGL (4 comments): "Moving reduction into Rust and sending screen bounded data to WebGL seems much more sensible than pushing millions of raw points into the browser." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089535)) "I can imagine this useful to 'compress' gigabytes of data onto a 2d canvas quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49090304)) "allowing it to render the entirety of OpenStreetMaps with sub-second pan/zooms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086884))
- Faster than other Python charting libraries (2 comments): "it's significantly faster than existing Python charting libraries for real-time updates" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089618)) "its also more performant than other python charting libs for small data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086571))
- Explains continuations and call/cc clearly (2 comments): "lets you do things like call/cc in a few lines" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747248)) "This helped me finally grok continuations!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747530))

## What people warn about

- Hard to understand or approach (2 comments): "homepage which weirdly does not really explain the language" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746518)) "looks like assembler and more complicated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747247))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ChartGPU](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chartgpu.md): 35 recommend
- [ggplot2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ggplot2.md): 29 recommend
- [plotnine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/plotnine.md): 22 recommend
- [ggsql](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ggsql.md): 19 recommend
- [Matplotlib](https://hackerapproved.com/p/matplotlib.md): 17 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "XY charting library", https://hackerapproved.com/p/xy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).