Closed apoorvkh closed 1 month ago
Hi @apoorvkh,
As you noticed, vl-convert-python
is a native compiled wheel, and it's fairly large. Both of these are consequences of the fact that vl-convert embeds the V8 JavaScript runtime (through the Deno project) in order to run the Vega-Lite and Vega JavaScript libraries without external dependencies. There is no obvious way, that I'm aware of, to reduce the size of vl-convert without reducing functionality.
This can't be a required dependency of the altair
package, because it would prevent Altair's use in architectures that aren't supported by Deno, but do run Python. A prominent example of this is Pyodide, for running Python in the browser.
I don't have a problem with adding an additional dependency group, but could you say more about why you wouldn't want to use the all
group?
Thanks a lot for the explanation!
could you say more about why you wouldn't want to use the
all
group?
I just want to use Altair to plot / interact with my data and save to a static file, so I can put figures in my academic papers. I simply don't need any of these (besides vl-convert-python
)! So I prefer not to depend on them (if I can) to avoid potential conflicts. And I am just bringing this up, because I feel that saving plots to static files is a rather core functionality.
https://github.com/vega/altair/blob/712680b2965eede4c40d93f52d3f963c5d181587/pyproject.toml#L57-L66
E.g. not even pandas
because I am using polars
; surprisingly, not even numpy
, because torch
seems to cover everything I need that is ML-related.
I made a simple PR with the change, in case this is sufficiently compelling to you. Please let me know, thanks!
What is your suggestion?
The
vl-convert-python
package is necessary for saving plots in PNG / SVG / PDF formats. I believe this is a rather critical function, so I'm wondering whyvl-convert-python
needs to be manually installed for this capability. (I see thataltair[all]
is an alternative, but I thinkvega_datasets
, etc. are less critical than the save functionality.)vl-convert-python
has zero dependencies. So I think this would be a simple addition. Maybe that is the reason Is this dependency optional because the built wheels are ~30 MB? Could this size be reduced?Thanks so much for your consideration!
Have you considered any alternative solutions?
Alternatively, could this (at least) be added to a new optional dependency group
altair[save]
, as suggested here?