[racket-dev] separate plot library into gui-requiring and non-gui-requiring

On 10/08/2013 11:22 AM, Stephen Chang wrote:
> Short question:
> Is there a way to separate the gui-requiring parts of plot from the
> non-gui-requiring parts?
>
> Long question:
> Many people have expressed pleasant surprise with the plot-evaluating
> ability of the racket pastebin Sam and I are working on.
>
> Most of the effort is due to scribble's nice sandbox evaluation
> capabilities but to get it fully working, I had to hack the plot
> library in my racket install.
>
> The problem is that plot uses racket/gui/base too eagerly but the
> server has no display, resulting in a gtk initialization error. I
> ultimately got around it by just commenting out all the gui parts of
> plot, knowing that it would never get invoked, but obviously this is
> an ugly solution.
>
> I should say that I don't think plot is at fault. The plot library
> does lazy-require racket/gui/base but that's not good enough because
> the laziness has to propagate to other requires that also require
> racket/gui/base (ie plot/snip) which isnt the case. But this cannot
> work anyways because lazy-require only works with functions and some
> of the things imported by plot/snip are classes.
>
> I spent awhile trying to separate the gui-requiring parts of plot but
> was unsuccessful. Maybe the change has to be in racket/gui/base itself
> (related to PR 12465) I don't really know. I guess I'm just looking
> for additional insight. Naively, slideshow/pict and 2htdp/draw do not
> have this problem so it seemed like it should be possible.

Right, racket/gui/base is necessary for snips. In all the documentation 
that uses plots (plot, math, images) I've used the following hack when 
setting up the evaluators:

   (eval '(require (rename-in (except-in plot plot plot3d)
                              [plot-pict  plot]
                              [plot3d-pict  plot3d])))

You could also rename `plot-bitmap' and `plot3d-bitmap'. (The docs use 
picts because they look better rendered in a PDF.) It wouldn't be hard 
to make a module that does that and provides everything. (Except 
possibly `plot-snip', `plot-frame', etc.)

I'm reluctant to single out one way of rendering when the GUI isn't 
available. Picts look nicer when scaled, but bitmaps look nicer when 
unscaled (plots are subpixel-rendered in this case). Picts take much 
more time to redraw, but for bitmaps it's just a blit.

Neil ⊥