# \[ANN\] SimplePlots.jl – Interactive Plots in 4 seconds or your money back

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-simpleplots-jl-interactive-plots-in-4-seconds-or-your-money-back/39903>\
**Category:** Package Announcements\
**Tags:** plotting, notebooks\
**Created:** [May 21, 2020, 6:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-simpleplots-jl-interactive-plots-in-4-seconds-or-your-money-back/39903 "2020-05-21T18:22:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![tamasgal](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tamasgal/32/27946_2.png) [@tamasgal](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tamasgal)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2020, 11:19pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-simpleplots-jl-interactive-plots-in-4-seconds-or-your-money-back/39903/10 "2020-05-21T23:19:11Z")

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(edit: all times are from the precompiled packages)

```julia
julia> @time using SimplePlots
  9.855101 seconds (13.16 M allocations: 637.564 MiB, 3.74% gc time)

```

However, there is a huge difference between the REPL and Jupyter and I think this should be emphasised. `SimplePlots` takes only 1.8s when I load it in a Jupyter session (compared to up to 10 seconds in the REPL):

 ![Screenshot 2020-05-22 at 10.01.14](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/6/e/6e45423691575af9c21b1340839af3c6cd657bb7.png)

Btw. Here is Plots.jl (REPL):

```julia
julia> @time using Plots
 12.610763 seconds (17.64 M allocations: 954.746 MiB, 3.46% gc time)

```

and UnicodePlots (REPL of course):

```julia
julia> @time using UnicodePlots
  5.658824 seconds (4.97 M allocations: 242.752 MiB, 1.36% gc time)

```

…and my favourite: `PGFPlotsX` which has the most complete feature-set I know of (thanks to tikz and pgf):

```julia
julia> @time using PGFPlotsX (also REPL)
  2.549934 seconds (3.06 M allocations: 151.271 MiB, 2.06% gc time)

```

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but I fear that adding more features will end up with the usual problems, however it seems that you only need some light wrappers around plotly.js so that might be very lightweight! Btw. if I would work on a daily basis with `Plots.jl` (as said, I work full-time with PGFPlotsX and it’s darn fast), I’d definitelly compile it into the system image, which means it can be loaded in less than a second, but this has other downsides too.

**However, I would like to stress out** that this comparison is kind of lacking a major thing: **interactivity**. So if you want to get an interactive plot within a few seconds, it’s definitely something! 🙂

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-simpleplots-jl-interactive-plots-in-4-seconds-or-your-money-back/39903)._