Plotting Using PLPlot

[Don]

dsimcha wrote:
> As the scientific computing libraries for D improve, I find myself wanting
> more and more to be able to plot stuff straight from D without having to rely
> on kludges like writing data out to a file and then calling Python or Matlab
> or something.  I've noticed that PLPlot has D bindings.  Its license is also
> reasonably permissive (LGPL).  This is certainly an improvement over nothing,
> but the API kind of sucks because it was written in C.  For example, instead
> of ranges or D arrays of arbitrary type, you pass data in as a double* and a
> number of data points.
> 
> On the other hand, all the nitty-gritty, low-level, probably
> platform-specific, stuff needed for a plotting library is (I guess) pretty
> good.  This led me to the following idea for how to get a good D plotting lib
> for relatively few man-hours:  Take the low-level stuff from PLPlot, and
> reimplement the higher level stuff on top of it in pure D, using the full
> power of templates, ranges, builtin arrays, etc.  I'm considering making this
> my next hobby project, and I'm interested in some suggestions on how it should
> be done (what a good API would be, etc.), as well as getting an idea of how
> many people are interested in something like this.

Definitely. I was considering doing vaguely the same thing (replacing my 
hacky WinAPI plot library which I've used up to now with a PLPlot 
binding). It's probably the biggest thing lacking in D's support for 
scientific computing.