Current state of the relationship between Plots and Makie

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There was a plan that Makie should eventually replace (or merge with) Plots. I would appreciate if someone in the know would give an update on the current state of affairs regarding this.

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I think Makie is unlikely to merge into Plots. Makie already uses some of Plots color and axis utilities (by PlotUtils), and there is a plan to make Makie consume recipes defined with RecipesBase, at which point Makie will be able to drop-in for Plots for plotting custom types from packages. This is by far the most important use case of Plots IMHO, and given that Makie is more modern and customisable that is likely to lead to it replacing Plots. I don’t know how far advanced coding up for that solution is, but I don’t think very far.

Note though that Makie has a very different relationships to backends. There is a proof-of-concept GR backend for Makie but the mechanics are different from the relationship between GR and Plots.jl. The syntax is also slightly different, though similar. But Makie is perfectly usable now (made much more approachable by static compilation) and Plots is still completely usable and maintained.

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Thank you for the answer and your work on the Julia plotting ecosystem! Recipes was actually the main reason why I asked; glad to hear that this is the plan - sounds perfect!

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Could you please give an update on this, @sdanisch? I will give a short introducing to Julia at my organisation soon and I will very likely get a question or two regarding plotting. Would be good to be able to provide some insight into this.

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The roadmap is relatively clear right now for me - and I think I solved the main design problems on paper.
Main blocker is, that I can’t work on it full time right now, but I hope to have a little hackathon soon to give development a boost!
Here are my TODO’s for the next release: Next release TODOs · Issue #336 · JuliaPlots/Makie.jl · GitHub
Maybe a bit cryptic, if you’re not very involved with Makie’s issues :wink:
I loosely target JuliaCon for a polished release - and there might be some work happening that can greatly speed up the creation of a WebGL backend, so this may or may not come before JuliaCon!

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