Show HN: XY – A Fast, composable, GPU-accelerated interactive plotting library

farhan99 | 4 hours ago

Great, Rust and Tailwind CSS two of my favorite things in one.

NickyHeC | 4 hours ago

been stuck on matplotlib for centuries, academia loves such a change

[OP] apetuskey | 4 hours ago

Thanks! Yes we are working on a Matplotlib compatible Api its very early but we hope to polish it up soon.

airstrike | 4 hours ago

> XY is an extremely fast, interactive, customizable Python charting library for the web

[OP] apetuskey | 4 hours ago

I have adjusted the title

kasts | 4 hours ago

I’m not convinced GPU acceleration is a meaningful advantage for most charting use cases. Most dashboards don’t render enough data for it to matter. Once a chart is dense enough for rendering to become the bottleneck, it normally is already be too crowded to be meaningful. Zooming can justify supporting larger datasets, but sampling/viewport culling and level of detail often avoid drawing unnecessary points...

[OP] apetuskey | 4 hours ago

It depends on how much data you are planning on showing, but as you can see from the benchmarks its also more performant than other python charting libs for small data.

We also built this library for extreme customization with CSS/Tailwind support so rendering large amounts of data is an important but not the only advantage.

formerly_proven | 4 hours ago

There are some niche charting applications which are offloaded to FPGAs and even ASICs.

Evidlo | 3 hours ago

I constantly have to work around the slowness of matplotlib when creating animated sequences for my scientific work (even with the Agg back end)

[OP] apetuskey | 3 hours ago

How many points are you working with usually?

moralestapia | 14 minutes ago

Feel free to not use it, then!

You don't have to justify your decision to people here, literally just move on with your life and forget about it.

cozzyd | 4 hours ago

no support for native GUI?

[OP] apetuskey | 4 hours ago

What do you mean by this?

cozzyd | 2 hours ago

like, not in a browser?

ranger_danger | 4 hours ago

> written in Rust

> XY is an extremely fast, interactive, customizable Python charting library

which is it?

[OP] apetuskey | 4 hours ago

Its a Python library with some rust in it, to speed up some of the calculations

xg15 | 4 hours ago

Python libraries can have compiled artifacts that were written in any language. This is such a library.

pcpliu | 4 hours ago

I misread it as ‘Chatting’ library and I was so confused on the GitHub page.

Love rust as the impl.

adhami | 3 hours ago

it's possible to render data out-of-core with XY, allowing it to render the entirety of OpenStreetMaps (that's 10,742,674,832 nodes!) with sub-second pan/zooms. it's a bit difficult to host online but you can try it out locally: https://github.com/reflex-dev/xy/tree/main/examples/osm

kl01 | 3 hours ago

absolutely fantastic.

kl01 | 3 hours ago

super cool!

HoneySpoons | 2 hours ago

This is awesome, can easily see this becoming a standard library. Can't wait for the 3D and volume visualizations.

ahns | 2 hours ago

Interesting; how do the examples compare to datashader?

Edit: for my use cases, I use napari (~1e7-8 points) if I need true interactivity; otherwise, datashader/holoviz, or even just fast-histogram's 2D histograms work.

For extremely large point clouds, these caveats[0] still apply. It irks me when people make dense scatterplots without any indication of just how dense some portions are.

Still, if it can indeed handle 1e10 points, that's pretty impressive.

[0]: https://datashader.org/user_guide/Plotting_Pitfalls.html

kl01 | 2 hours ago

how does this stack up to evilcharts? my main use case is mapping out data onto frontend, and there are a lot of great libraries out there

[OP] apetuskey | 2 hours ago

its a python charting library

hantusk | 29 minutes ago

Check out mosaic from uwdata which works on top of Observable plot

Or plotly-resampler which works on top of plotly and uses the rust package tsdownsample to aggregate on the 4pixels per pixel shown level (to make antialias work)

the grammar of graphics approach really is a great abstraction, and I'd love to see xy work in that direction

[OP] apetuskey | 12 minutes ago

Thanks! XY already uses a similar pixel-aware approach

long line and area traces are reduced in Rust using M4 to produce viewportsized extrema, that is then refined as you zoom. Dense scatter plots use a fixed-size density grid plus a representative sample

raychis | 28 minutes ago

Interesting approach to large scale visualisation. Moving reduction into Rust and sending screen bounded data to WebGL seems much more sensible than pushing millions of raw points into the browser. How does it perform with real time updates? I am assuming it is much more performant? Any plans for a prod deployment?

[OP] apetuskey | 22 minutes ago

Yes, it’s significantly faster than existing Python charting libraries for real-time updates.

Instead of serializing and sending the full dataset as JSON, it sends compact typed binary buffers and only the screen-relevant data reducing payload size and browser-side work.

More detail here https://github.com/reflex-dev/xy#how-it-works

pytorch_app4 | 13 minutes ago

How much did LLMs help with development?

Also remember to kill all pedophiles, like Rust advocates such as Jeremy Bicha and Hacker News moderators.