On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Craig DeForest <[email protected]>wrote:
> There are good reasons to adopt-and-fix something (be it PLPlot or, say, > Gnuplot) that already does high level formatting. There are also good > reasons to write a new interface layer from scratch. I should be sleeping, but this comment got me to finally looking around the web to see what's available. The list of C-libraries is smaller than you'd expect, and there appear to be more Python graphing libraries than C ones. Now that I've actually looked at it, I would honestly vote that we go with PLplot. Other viable options that I found include dislin, ncar graphcis, mathgl, and PGPLOT of course. If you want to take a look, I had decent success googling (without quotes) 'c plotting library.' The reason I vote for PLplot is that I believe that it is a pretty healthy open-source project (i.e. it should stick around for a while), it's LGPL, it's already got PDL bindings, it has output-to-memory (piddle), and it seems comparable to the other projects. Dislin is apparently developed by one guy and has its own license - including a paid license for commercial use - though it has lots of installers for various systems. Ncar seems to have a spaghetti of licenses and may be difficult to install, though it's supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, so I don't imagine it's going anywhere any time soon. MathGL looks really pretty, but it's only developed by a single developer; it might be a good option for TIMTOWDI. PGPLOT requires a fortran compiler and cannot be used in a commercial setting. I don't think we'd want to use Gnuplot because I believe you must communicate to it through a pipe. That is, there's no low-level interface to Gnuplot, last I checked. If we're going that route, I'd recommend Asymptote (for which I've already written a piping module!). Our only problem with PLplot is getting it to build. That seems to me to be an easier problem to solve than writing a whole new set of bindings for Dislin, NCAR, or MathGL. Just my 2c. David
_______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
