Plotting Using PLPlot

[Robert Fraser]

dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Fawzi Mohamed (fmohamed at mac.com)'s article
>> On 2009-05-10 21:23:48 +0200, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> said:
>>> It seems like there's substantial interest in this.  Please give me some use
>>> cases, i.e. what would you personally use this for, and what do you
>>> foresee others
>>> using it for, so I can start thinking about what the API should be.  I
>>> need a wide
>>> variety of use cases because, if I design the API based only on my personal use
>>> cases, it will end up being geared entirely toward histograms, scatter
>>> plots, and
>>> line graphs because that's what I use regularly.
>> yep me too, well 3d surface plots would also be nice to have, but I can
>> live without.
>>> Besides use cases, here are some specific questions:
>>> 1.  Is there any need for an OO-based API, or should I just use free functions?
>> I would use an OO API where one window/image/output graph is
>> represented by an object, and then you have functions to
>>> 2.  Does anyone have any use cases where plotting is performance critical, or
>>> should I just keep things simple/stupid in terms of the performance/simplicity
>>> tradeoff?
>> keep it simple I would just send dense arrays to it (which are close to
>> the C api), and then have utility functions that convert ranges,... to
>> dense arrays, but maybe I am biased because I have a good library to
>> handle dense arrays.
>> I would say that a reasonable goal is that the library could cope
>> directly to plot of 1'000s of points at least for the simple 1D plot
>> types.
> 
> Ok, this is way less than I had in mind.  When I said high performance, I was
> thinking like, either plotting stuff under realtime constraints like if you're
> some Wall Street bigwig plotting zillions of charts to figure out what stocks to
> buy or, when doing summary stuff like histograms, handling billions of points read
> as a range from a file, i.e. more data than you have address space.  I personally
> would not consider anything that couldn't gracefully handle at least a few million
> data points for histograms and a few 10s of thousands for scatter plots to be good
> enough.

Having plots that update in realtime would be kind of awesome for 
monitoring, but the ones I was thinking of wouldn't be more than a few 
thousand data points in each sliding window, if that.