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This Sunday was all about rendering React components with canvas and smoothly animating 10k+ circles.
We did it! Well, the canvas part. The smooth animation part … not so much. Turns out that part’s hard.
It all started with some tedious coding to update the React particles experiment to D3 v4. Some idiot (me) had had the bright idea of changing that and not finishing the transition.
With the release candidate version of D3v4, importing the entire library no longer works. From now on, you have to do something like import { randomNormal } from 'd3' to get specific bits and pieces. This is tedious, but it produces smaller bundles in the end. All in all, it’s better this way.
Our slow implementation was back. \o/
Then we turned to react-konva, “a JavaScript library for drawing complex canvas graphics using React.” In theory, we should be able to render our particles using HTML5 canvas without changing our code too much.
It’s based on the Konva library, which looks like a sort of D3 for canvas. It gives you a bunch of useful abstractions to make 2d graphicsing easier.
To my surprise, the conversion was simple.
We had to change our main render method to use a Konva Stage instead of an <svg> node:
<stage width={this.props.svgWidth} height={this.props.svgHeight}>
<layer>
<particles particles={this.props.particles}></particles>
</layer>
</stage>
We also wrapped it in a big <div> to help D3 detect the mouse events we need for particle generation. Yes, we could have moved away from D3 for those, but it was already coded up, so why change?
We had to change the Particles render method to use Konva’s Circle component.
<group>
{particles.map((particle) => (
<circle
radius="1.8"
x={particle.x}
y={particle.y}
key={particle.id}
fill="black"
/>
))}
</group>
Things Just Worked™. Kind of. Our animation looked less than smooth, even with just 200 particles. With a few thousand, it was comically bad.
Not cool, React. Not cool. Canvas is supposed to be super fast! Maybe this is a bit faster than the SVG approach? It’s hard to tell.
We did some profiling and discovered that calculating a new frame takes only 7 milliseconds. Flushing those changes to React components … heh … that took anywhere from 200ms to 980ms.
?
Yikes.
The culprit seems to be a function called updateChildren deep in the bowels of React.
We’ll find a workaround on Sunday the 10th of July. There are several promising venues to explore, anything from using better Konva components (FastLayer is a thing) to avoiding prop updates as the driver of our animation. Somehow. We’ll figure it out.
See you next time.
PS: the edited and improved versions of these videos are becoming a video course. Readers of the engineer package of React+d3js ES6 get the video course for free when it’s ready.
Continue reading about Livecoding #13: rendering React components with canvas
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- Livecoding #14: Mostly-smooth animation up to 4,000 elements with React and canvas
- Livecoding #12: towards animating 10k+ elements with React
- Livecoding #15: Reaching the limits of canvas redraw speed
- Livecoding #16: canvas.drawImage performance is weird but magical
- Livecoding #18: An abstract React transition component
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