Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Is anyone using cl-2d?

I wrote a Common Lisp plotting library called cl-2d in 2009, and I have been using it for my own graphs ever since. I am currently working on a library that implements the same functionality but with a much more friently interface and a different engine, using LaTeX and pgf to generate the plots instead of cairo. This gives me a lot of useful features out of the box, including very nicely formatted formulas if I want to use them in annotations, and it is reasonably fast for my purposes.

I plan to remove the existing cl-2d repository from Github, put up a new one (it is a complete rewrite from scratch, there isn't much sense in carrying around the old source), and recycle the name (for both the package and the library).

I don't think that there is anyone out there using the current version of this library, but in case you are, please let me know soon.

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6 comments:

  1. Maciej KatafiaszSeptember 7, 2011 at 4:12 AM

    I'm using it, and have found it very useful thanks to the flexible automatic layout. The fact it's powered by Cairo is also very handy, since I use it in a CL-GTK2 app.

    I'd very definitely want to see it stay, and in general I don't think it's a good idea to reuse prior names and remove old sources; it has bitten me more than once when people do that.

    PS. Since it doesn't seem I've ever got any reply, did you get my cl-cairo pull request on github?

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  2. AnonymousSeptember 7, 2011 at 7:58 PM

    It is quite common for new "major versions" (e.g. version 1, version 2) to have significant breaking API changes. The question is how to represent this in CL packages/ASDF systems.

    I'd also suggest not totally blowing away the old source repos. Keeping them around is a cheap nod towards legacy support.

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  3. MartinSeptember 11, 2011 at 3:55 AM

    Hi Tamas,

    i found your blog through the planet lisp meta blog and find it very interesting for a newbie hobby lisper like I am.

    I was looking for something like cl-2d before and I am really upset to have found it. But I am facing some problems using it. I have installed it using quicklisp on my system (OS X 10.6.8, sbcl 1.0.51) but if i try to load it:


    CL-USER(1): (asf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl-2d)


    I am getting an error that libcairo isn't found on my system.


    Unable to load foreign library (LIBCAIRO).
    Error opening shared object "libcairo.dylib":
    dlopen(libcairo.dylib, 10): image not found.


    The library is installed in /usr/X11/lib/libcairo.dylib.

    I could not found any hints so far in the web. Could you point me in some direction for getting it to work?

    Thanks a lot
    Martin

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  4. Tamas K PappSeptember 11, 2011 at 4:04 AM

    Maciej, nuntius, and other who wrote in e-mail: I will leave cl-2d up as it is now, and pick a new name for the new library. However, I don't plan to develop cl-2d any further.

    Martin: all you need is CFFI to find the library. I don't know how to do that on a Mac, check the CFFI docs.

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  5. MartinSeptember 11, 2011 at 4:46 AM

    Tamas,

    thanks a lot! I was fiddling around a lot with *foreign-library-directories* but was messing something up. After your comment I got things straight and now it works :-)

    Regards
    Martin

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  6. AnonymousSeptember 12, 2011 at 5:47 AM

    Hi Tamas,
    First of all, thanks for your libs!

    I've been keeping cl-2d in mind for a while, should I want to plot anything in CL, but somehow didn't get to it.

    This post made me clone the cl-2d :) and quickload it to check out. Somehow cl-numlib needed in examples isn't in quicklisp, so I again had to postpone this acquaintance until later.

    Anyways, I'm looking forward for a new, improved 2D (or even 3D?) plotter for CL, something like matplotlib for python.

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