[Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 2/19/09, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

[...]

> On 19 February 2009 at 09:33, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> | If primitive 3d scatterplot interactivity is all you want, go with
> | rggobi. It's GTK and has all this already and much more. However,
> | ggobi also shows why GTK is not a good choice for general interactive
> | graphics toolkit - it [GTK] is slow and lacks reasonable graphics
> | support. OpenGL is IMHO a better way to go since IG don't really
> | leverage any of the widgets (you get them for free via R widgets
> | packages anyway) and OpenGL gives you excellent speed, alpha-support
> | and anti-aliasing etc.
>
> I don't want to turn this into an all-out 'vi versus emacs' slugfest but:
>
> -- GTk it not the only choice, and I have been very happy with Qt (and Qwt
>    for a simple yet nice plot widget) on both Linux and Windows; I don't
> have
>    access to a Mac so I didn't test there.
>
> -- Qt supports OpenGL natively. The demos are very impressive (for OpenGL as
>    well as the other widgets).
>
> -- Deepayan has been working on Qt-based code to enhance R, as that appears
>    to be 'unannounced' I won't post the SVN repo but allow me to state that
>    the code already ran all (or almost all) examples from the lattice book.

Just to expand on that: yes, I have been working on a Qt-based
infrastructure, and Michael Lawrence is also involved now, and has
been working on refining and optimizing it for more general uses. The
details are still in flux, but we hope to have something to show at
DSC.

Which is not to say that other alternatives wouldn't be good, of course.

-Deepayan