On 2009-05-11 02:05:51 +0200, Robert Fraser <fraseroftheni...@gmail.com> said:
dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Fawzi Mohamed (fmoha...@mac.com)'s article
On 2009-05-10 21:23:48 +0200, dsimcha <dsim...@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.
my answer was along the keep it simple lines, you cannot really expect
to represent more than some 1000s of points, if you have more you
should do some transformation to represent them.
Histogram for example reduce them, some cluster or spread analysis and
represent fewer discrete objects,...
All those things can be built later, the only thing needed is a basic
lib that supports few 1000s of simple objects well, and less of complex
objects.
even realtime update an animations can be done if the library is fast
for its basic use.
Keep it simple, the fancy stuff can be built on the top of it later.
