Skip to content

Cannot render plots with high datetime accuracy - needs 64bit datetime support in the renderer? #487

Open

Description

@alastairtree

Awesome tool - thanks for releasing it, it is very good.
I have been testing it out with some time series science data - a line chart of values with datetimes on the x axis and I think the renderer struggles if you have large amounts of datetime data of the order of hundreds of datapoints per second, plotting many hours of data, so millions of data items to plot

It ends up looking like this - the x axis datetimes are getting quantised i think

Image

And it should look more like this without the gaps/quantisation by forcing the data to a lower rate:

Image

My AI coding companion reckons this on the cause of the issue:

looks like a bug in the xy charting library (v0.0.6): its WebGL client reconstructs each point's pixel position from a shared GLSL decode helper, xyDecode(encoded, meta) = encoded/meta.y + meta.x, entirely in 32-bit float. A real calendar-date epoch (~1.7e12 ms since 1970) exceeds f32's ~2^24 integer precision budget, so every point in a narrow window rounds to the same pixel column. This affects every mark type (line/scatter/step/stairs/segments all funnel through the same shader)

Activity

  1. alastairtree commented on Aug 12, 2026

    @alastairtree
    Author

    I threw some AI tokens at this and alastairtree#1 is the result. I do not know the codebase well enough to know if this is a good suggested fix or not so i will just link out to it but not submit a PR for it for now.

  2. Alek99 commented on Aug 12, 2026

    @Alek99
    Member

    Thanks I'll take a look at the pr

  3. Alek99 commented on Aug 12, 2026

    @Alek99
    Member

    I think there are a few things that need to be fixed but if you open a pr on the repo I can leave some comments

  4. alastairtree commented on Sep 19, 2026

    @alastairtree
    Author

    This is still waiting on a second round of PR review over at #489 @Alek99 if you get a chance. Thank you.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions