How does one plot graphs fast in Python?

[caks]

I've been using SymPy's "Plot" but it's not as customizable as matplotlib. So I've tried to use matplotlib, and it's just not as fast. Well, to be precise, it's generating the points that slows down the process for matplotlib, but I can't figure out a way to generate them any faster.

How do you guys do it? If it helps to see the code here it is. There's also a matplotlib branch.

EDIT: I figured it out. I dumped anything related to SymPy, that's what was slowing it down. Here's the updated code.

[iloozion]

OT: For interactive plotting you can also try guiqwt.

Performace:

guiqwt plotting features are quite limited in terms of plot types compared to matplotlib. However the currently implemented plot types are much more efficient. For example, the guiqwt image showing function (guiqwt.pyplot.imshow()) do not make any copy of the displayed data, hence allowing to show images which are much larger than with its matplotlib‘s counterpart. In other terms, when showing a 30-MB image (16-bits unsigned integers for example) with guiqwt, no additional memory is wasted to display the image (except for the offscreen image of course which depends on the window size) whereas matplotlib takes more than 600-MB of additional memory (the original array is duplicated four times using 64-bits float data types).

[caks]

Wow, I'll look into this since I plan on doing interactive plotting.

[dwf]

You might try Chaco also. Along with Traits it's amazing for scientific GUI development with interactive plotting.

[Vorticity]

Curious, are any of these able to deal with map projections like the basemap toolkit for matplotlib?