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Comment by enriquto

That would be preposterous if it wasn't so hilariously false:

> These days, having a GPU is practically a prerequisite to doing science, and visualization is no exception.

It becomes really funny when they go on to this, as if it was a big deal:

> Depicted below is an example of plotting 3 million points

Anybody who has ever used C or fortran knows that a modern CPU can easily churn through "3 million points" at more than 30 frames per second, using just one thread. It's not a particularly impressive feat, three million points is the size of a mid-resolution picture, and you can zoom-in and out those trivially in real-time using a CPU (and you could do that 20 years ago, as well). Maybe the stated slowness of fastplotlib comes from the unholy mix of rust and python?

Now, besides this rant, I think that fastplotlib is fantastic and, as an (unwilling) user of Python for data science, it's a godsend. It's just that the hype of that website sits wrong in me. All the demos show things that could be done much easier and just as fast when I was a teenager. The big feat, and a really big one at that, is that you can access this sort of performance from python. I love it, in a way, because it makes my life easier now; but it feels like a self-inflicted problem was solved in a very roundabout way.

parent enriquto 1 year ago

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