Typed Rust backend API

[nicoburns]

What would you like?
Rather than SVG string output, I would like a typed Rust representation of the vector graphic elements that I could render directly.

Use case

• Efficiently rendering plots to screen in Rust GUI applications
• Make it possible to implement 3rd-party backends

Any prior art?

The plotters DrawingBackend trait implements this idea. Although it complicates things by trying to support vector and bitmaps backends in the same trait. I think a simpler trait with SVG (vector) semantics would be fine

The Scene type is almost usable for this. Except that it uses stringly-typed defs rather than a typed representation of things like linear gradients (and I'm not sure if there is public way to render to a Scene?)

I would recommend building this on top of the kurbo, peniko, and possibly anyrender crates which already have a representation for most of SVG.

[Psy-Fer]

Hmm some good points. I definitely didn't have gui apps in mind when building this and the scene building and renderes are still a little cobbled together as they grew. I think it should absolutely be possible to allow for 3rd party backends. At the moment the other 2 backends, png and pdf are just being built from svg.

I'll have to have a bit of a think in the park and a notebook to see how I want to organise the backends, and what to do about the current state of scenes. At the very least I need to unify the API because that's a mess right now.

I have tried to keep the dependencies low because so often you pull on 2 or 3 crates and suddenly 10 things don't work and you have whole doc trees explaining all the feature incompatibilities. (I've been down this road before 😅). This is to say I'm pretty selective whit the crates I do end up using.