Plotting Using PLPlot

[Bill Baxter]

A D-ish wrapper around PLPlot's low-level D-to-C bindings sounds great
to me too.
I frequently use the D -> data file -> Python matplotlib  route
myself.  Something more direct would be great.

--bb

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Fawzi Mohamed <fmohamed at mac.com> wrote:
> On 2009-05-10 05:19:53 +0200, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> said:
>
>> 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.
>
> This is definitely very interesting, having an integrated plot would be very
> nice
>
> Fawzi
>
>