Fwd: MatplotLib

[Arafat Khan]

Hi Sciruby,

As per John's recommendation, I emailed @lava the author of matplotlib-cpp.

Here is a very interesting response.

Thanks

Regards,

Arafat 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Benno Evers <benno.mar...@googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: MatplotLib
To: Arafat Khan <arafat....@gmail.com>

Hi Arafat,

sorry for the late reply.

Looking through the proposal, it certainly looks like you've picked a pretty cool, but rather ambitious task.

From a maintainability perspective, I doubt that building a Ruby API on top of matplotlib-cpp is the way to go.

The reason being that being that when I started working on this, I was already way behind on my thesis deadline, so I needed something that produced results *asap* and was easy to use. Good software engineering never was a consideration. That's why the library embeds an actual python interpreter, requires a global lock for all function calls, and prevents all other uses of python within the same process. (it's also the reason why i'm hesitant to add 'proper' CMake support, I don't really want it to resemble a conventional library too much)

So, if you decided to build a Ruby API on top of that, you would end up with a ruby library that internally starts a python interpreter *and* would prevent other applications from linking against both your library and another python library. It seems to me like that would be a rather obscure architecture, and would in the long-term lead to lots of frustration over hard-to-find bugs.

Instead, since you seem to be willing to invest some time in a proper solution, I would suggest to go with the alternative that you discarded in your proposal and try to fork the C core of matplotlib, expose the functions contained in it and re-build the python part in C as far as practicable, with a new ruby library on top of that.

This way, since a C library would be usable from any other language, the core part could be useful to a wider set of people than just ruby developers and would therefore be able to get more interest and contributions. It also opens up some desirably features, in particluar proper multi-threading support, that are plain impossible to add when building on top of python.

Best Regards,

Benno

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 6:06 PM, Arafat Khan <arafat....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Benno,

I am Arafat a student developer working with Scientific Ruby Foundation.

I recently came across your project matplotlib-cpp and found it to be really cool.

Actually, we are building a very complete Matplotlib from scratch in ruby. We are willing to spend 3 months(or more if needed) of full-time work from Multiple people for this over-ambitious project. I have an application for this project. Since you have a lot of experience, I would be very thankful if you would like to offer any thoughts on our design and thought process behind this project.

Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Arafat