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API design notes

Current state

fig, ax = plt.subplots() # and friends

  • To show during interactive use or in a script: plt.show() will show all figures that have been created by pyplot that have note been plt.close()d.
  • plt.show(block=False) will show the current figure, but continue the script.
  • works with inline
  • works with ipympl

Pros:

  • easy to show all plots.

Cons:

  • mixed in with rest of pyplot
  • too many figures open; must manually close the ones we don't want anymore or memory grows. For a large jupyter notebook with cells executed many times, this can actually be substantial.

fig = matplotlib.figure.Figure()

  • cannot do fig.show(), but can do fig.savefig()
  • does not display anything in either inline or ipympl

Pros:

  • fig will be garbage collected because there are no references stored in a registry

Cons:

  • no way to show the figure on a GUI backend (no promotion possible).
  • ugly import.

Proposed changes

mpl_gui

  • import matplotlib.mpl_gui as mg; fig, ax = mg.subplots()
  • Can be shown, but with new mg.show([fig]) (though singleton fig could trivially be added).
  • jupyter: works without show in ipympl; does not (currently) work (at all) with inline.

Pros:

  • no global state - garbage collection on dereferenced figures
  • no connection to pyplot state-based interface

Cons:

  • New import and documentation (inertia relative to pyplot)
  • mg.show() doesn't know what figures to show, so it must be supplied a list of figures.
    • sometimes we create figures in loops, and assigning a different variable name to each figure to stop if from being dereferenced could be cumbersome.

mpl_gui.registry

  • import matplotlib.mpl_gui.registry as mr; fig, ax = mr.subplots()
  • allows mr.show() to be exactly the same as plt.show.

Pros:

  • no connection to pyplot state-based interface
  • exactly same as previous pyplot interface for this type of work.

Cons:

  • figures must be explicitly closed

mpl_gui.FigureContext

This is between the two extremes, where there is no global registry, but a registry is maintained for a series of plots within a context:

with mg.FigureContext() as fc:
    fig, ax = fc.subplots()
    fig, ax = fc.subplot_mosaic('AA\nBC')
    fig = fc.figure

makes three figures and shows them in a blocking manner, and then removes the registry on completion.

Top-level import?

The question arose as to whether these should be top level imports eg fig, ax = mpl.subplots() A choice would need to be made as to whether that is the registry or non-registry version of the new interface.