Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
dsimcha wrote: 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. 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? 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? I vote for simple free functions. 1) It will enable us to create a DLL. 2) An OOP framework can be added on top of free functions. (probably by using mixin templates) Björn
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
What is needed to add a dwt device driver?
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
On 2009-05-10 05:19:53 +0200, dsimcha dsim...@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
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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 fmoha...@mac.com wrote: On 2009-05-10 05:19:53 +0200, dsimcha dsim...@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
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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. 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? 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?
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
dsimcha wrote: 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? 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? I'd stick with (2) for now.
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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. Fawzi
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
== 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.
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
dsimcha wrote: 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. 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? 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? I would be *very* interested in a plotting library for D. (Currently I output my data to text files, which I then process in Gnuplot.) You've already mentioned line graphs. The other thing I use most are 3D plots, i.e. z as a function of x and y -- preferably with color/gradient mapping. In such plots one should be able to specify the viewpoint from which the graph is seen. A special case should be the top-down view, which is essentially a 2d plot where the z axis value is represented solely by color/brightness. I think the functions should be able to work with both data sets and functions, i.e. both plot (real[] x, real[] y) and plot (real function(real) f, real xLeft, real xRight) should be available. Regarding the API, I say keep it as simple as possible -- at least to begin with. I would love it if plotting my results could be done almost as simply as writefln'ing them. :) -Lars
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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.
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
dsimcha Wrote: 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. 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? 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? All my plotting would be real time monitoring of program operation. While I'm performance-sensitive, I would not expect a plotting library to be terribly efficient. A seamless way to allow plotting data over a socket would be awesome. My current uses would involve two kinds of plots: line graphs that where I append data for the most recent timestamp. bar graphs or maybe points with error bars (x axis is has labels, not numbers)
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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.
Plotting Using PLPlot
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.
Re: Plotting Using PLPlot
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.
