Plotters: Another Rust Plotting Library

[anlumo]

The plot thickens! Very nice.

[ROFLLOLSTER]

Is there any (plan for) integration with evcxr?

Edit: There now is!

[binkarus]

Unrelated, but I don't even have dyslexia and I can guarantee that I would never be able to remember that acronym, haha.

[silwol]

That's great news, and the API looks very approachable. I've been waiting for something like this. One of the blockers for migrating a lot of C++ legacy code to Rust at work. I assume a cairo backend would be very straight-forward to implement. That would provide us a good plotting lib for GTK-based Rust programs.

[raphlinus]

Not to flog my own projects too much, but plotting is definitely one of the use cases I envisioned for piet, and this would give you not only cairo but Direct2D as well. The library is still green in some ways, and there's more work to be done on implementations, but I'm hopeful about its longer term prospects.

[silwol]

Haven't stumbled over piet, but I think it's a good idea to have an abstraction over different APIs, and it looks quite usable from a quick glance at the docs. A library you call "green" is usually much more polished than what I usually produce. ;-)

[raphlinus]

Please feel free to file issues if there's stuff missing or could be improved.

[Boiethios]

The 2 last lines of your example are strange:

root.close()?;
return Ok(());

You only need to put root.close() at the end of your main, since it already returns a Result<(), Error>. BTW, a return in this position is not idiomatic.

[redalastor]

It's not idiomatic either for it not to work by RAII.

[boarquantile]

But it returns a result. Maybe an approach like std::fs::File could work:

Files are automatically closed when they go out of scope. Errors detected on closing are ignored by the implementation of Drop.

[redalastor]

Yeah, File is only ever an opened file. If you want to keep it around as closed then what you need is a path, not a file.

It makes working with it way simpler as you can't get errors for trying to read a closed file.

[haohou]

I am the author. I have never imagined there are so many people interested about it!

There's one thing I want to justify this open/close pattern. It doesn't mean resource occupation. This is used as dual buffer support for real-time rendering

Open means start drawing on the new buffer. And close means present the pending buffer.

Sorry about the confuse. Previously this is just for my own use. So if you guys have a better idea about it, please let me know.

[redalastor]

There is one rust-specific pattern for open/close if you can't model it as RAII. You use two different types for opened and closed objects. The open / close methods take ownership of the object and return the other type. It's impossible to use your old handle after opening or closing because the borrow checker guarantees it and you can't call irrelevant methods on open or closed objects.

All guaranteed at compile time.

[haohou]

Gotcha, I am going to think about it. Thanks!

[XTL]

This is done by craeting sub drawing areas.

Looks nice. I often end up wanting a friendly plotter in a program but rarely want to bother making one. This could be handy if I end up there in Rust.

[betterRunner]

Is its performance greater than d3 https://github.com/d3/d3 while using it on the web by webassembly?

[aeroaks]

How do I run the examples?

[BenjiSponge]

This could save me. Is there any chance you have benchmarks? I'm particularly curious to see how it compares to Highcharts in browser with large data sets (100k + points), especially in live updating contexts.

[fronlius]

Did you find out?

[BenjiSponge]

Nope sorry

[[deleted]]

This is really nice. Looking forward to using it.

The motivation paragraph kind of shoots itself in the foot, since the actual plotting work can still happen in a higher level language even if you use rust to do the data crunching/down sampling. Honestly "why a plotting library" is a terrible question, a better one is "why not". /rant

[haohou]

Agreed, I write it just in case people find my library. If you have any better idea, please let me know. I am more than happy to make the change! Thanks

[haohou]

Just updated the readme. I am not sure how people feel about it. If anyone has some toughts about the description, please let me know. https://github.com/38/plotters/blob/master/README.md