About Mandala
Hi, I'm Kumar Saurabh LinkedIn. Mandala is something I build in my spare time, mostly because I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I've always had a soft spot for complex numbers. There's something a little unreasonable about the Mandelbrot set: you take z² + c, run it in a loop, and out falls this endlessly detailed shape that nobody sat down and designed. I wanted to be able to fall into it myself, so I wrote something that lets me zoom.
A few things I keep coming back to, and they all show up here:
- Complex-number algebra. The whole set grows out of one tiny rule,
z → z² + c. I still find it hard to believe that something this simple hides this much. - Fractals. Every time you zoom, there's more to see: spirals, little copies of the whole set, thin filaments that were always there waiting at a smaller scale. I don't think I'll ever be done looking.
- WebAssembly. I wanted to know how far a browser could really go. The heavy math runs in a Rust core compiled to WebAssembly, split across a pool of Web Workers, so work that used to need a native app now happens behind a link.
How deep it goes
Plain f64 floating point gives up somewhere around 1e-15, where the picture turns blocky. So Mandala raises its precision as you go deeper:
| Zoom depth | Tier | Technique |
|---|---|---|
down to ~1e-13 | f64 | direct double-precision iteration |
~1e-13 to ~1e-27 | double-double | about 31 significant digits |
| past that | perturbation | arbitrary-precision reference orbit plus per-pixel deltas |
The right tier gets picked for you and shown in the HUD. Shallow zooms render on the GPU in a single shader pass; deeper ones move to a parallel CPU and WebAssembly tile renderer. The two hand off with a cross-fade, so you never catch a flash between them.
A couple of small things I care about: the default palette (Viridis) is chosen to stay readable if you're colour-blind, and if your system asks for reduced motion, the fades and the Zen drift quietly step aside.
Questions?
The practical ones — is it free, how sharing works, where bookmarks live — have quick answers on the FAQ page. The mathematical ones have a whole field guide: nine chapters and a glossary, every figure rendered by Mandala itself and one click from the live view. If you are choosing software, the fractal-tool comparison documents where Mandala fits beside Ultra Fractal, Kalles Fraktaler, XaoS, Mandelbulber and flame editors.
Thanks for taking a look. I hope you find something down there that surprises you.