mourner/simplify-js

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2393 stars · 207 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Simplify.js is a tiny, high-performance JavaScript library for 2D/3D polyline simplification, extracted from Leaflet. It combines the Douglas-Peucker and Radial Distance algorithms to dramatically reduce the number of points in a polyline while retaining its shape.

Use cases

• simplify map routes before rendering on canvas or svg
• reduce points in a 70k-point line chart for faster rendering
• downsample GPS tracks to shrink data size
• smooth noisy polyline data while keeping its shape
• speed up geometric processing of large coordinate arrays

When to choose

• you need fast, dependency-free polyline/point reduction in JavaScript in the browser or Node
• you render large paths (maps, charts) and want to cut visual noise and boost performance
• you want a tiny, well-tested algorithm extracted from Leaflet

When to avoid

• you need polygon topology-aware simplification (e.g. mapnik/topo-style shared-edge simplification)
• you work in another language and prefer a native port (ports exist for Python, Rust, Go, etc.)
• you need geodesic-aware simplification that accounts for projection distortion

Facets

library · maturity stable

math graphics data-visualization graphics data-visualization browser cross-platform polyline-simplification geometry douglas-peucker maps canvas svg algorithms nodejs

Member repositories

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