d3 language benchmark visualizations

After reading this blog post by Guillaume Marceau I was inspired to recreate his visualizations using d3.

Marceau’s first graph overlays qualitative terms on a scatter plot of the benchmarks. This is easy enough to do with d3 and svg.

His next graph shows a static picture of the performance star for the Scala programming language. My version highlights the interactivity of d3 with a language selection menu.

Marceau then shows a matrix of all the languages’ performance stars. This is not difficult to do in d3, but all these dots sure give my browser’s rendering engine a run for its money. If you have a suggestion on making this more efficient, please do submit a pull request.

Marceau introduces a small multiples chart of the performance stars. I think simplifying things by getting rid of the dots really brings out the character of the stars. Marceau chooses to color the backgrounds by the presence of lambda-like features, as well as highlighting the c languages.

My version splits them a little differently. Feel free to argue with me about the distinctions.

That’s all for now. Fork and enjoy.