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zekeriyasari / Causal.jl

Causal.jl - A modeling and simulation framework adopting causal modeling approach.
https://zekeriyasari.github.io/Causal.jl/dev/
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Unneccessary dependency on Plots.jl #19

Closed BeastyBlacksmith closed 4 years ago

BeastyBlacksmith commented 4 years ago

Hi, I just noticed, that you package depends on Plots.jl without actually needing it. The only places you use that is in tutorials and examples. I would suggest to add separate envrionments for those folders, which depend on this package and Plots and then remove Plots from the package environment. That will help the precompilation time of your package.

zekeriyasari commented 4 years ago

Thank you very much for your suggestion @BeastyBlacksmith

But, Jusdl depends on Plots for the construction of Scopes. Scopes are used to visualize(plot) the data flowing through connections of the model online (while the model is being simulated.) Maybe, I should enrich the documentation of Scopes in the docs of Jusdl by giving a working example.

Yes, as you said, I also use Plots in the docs of Jusdl and already added a separate environment for the docs folder which adds Plots as a dependency in its Project.toml file.

Do you think there is anything I am missing?

BeastyBlacksmith commented 4 years ago

It would be better to write a user recipe for Scopes and only depend on RecipesBase. Thats far more lightweight than plots. See also https://docs.juliaplots.org/latest/recipes/.

zekeriyasari commented 4 years ago

Ok. I have not written any recipe before, but the docs of Recipes look great and detailed. I hope I'll succeed. I appreciate very much your advice.

BeastyBlacksmith commented 4 years ago

If you run into trouble, ask here or in the plots.jl streams of slack/zulip

zekeriyasari commented 4 years ago

Hello again @BeastyBlacksmith

Thank you for inviting me to slack/zulip. I joined the plots.jl streams of slack/zulip and asked a question about the RecipesBase and Plots. I think the examples of RecipesBase and Plots about recipes should be revised and the users should be warned against scoping issues. But, this time the question is more specific to this issue. Hence, I am giving my opinions here.

I have been going through the documentation of RecipesBase and Plots. It seems to me that using just RecipesBase does not satisfy the requirements of Scope. The reason is the following.

The aim of the Scope is to visualize the data flowing through the connections of the model. During a simulation, the data on the Scope is updated and visualized on a GUI window. This example is an illustration of what I mean.

As far as I see from the documentation, RecipesBase has nothing to do with GUI windows. It provides preprocessing recipes for data visualization. Even though I define a user recipe for my custom type Scope, Plots must be loaded to actually visualize the data on the Scope during the simulation. Thus, it seems inevitable to me that Plots (or any other data visualization tool such as Makie or the backends themselves like GR, PyPlot, etc.) must be added as a dependency to Jusdl.

BeastyBlacksmith commented 4 years ago

I see. Yes, if you do the plot calls for the user, then recipes are not a big help. Sorry for the mislead here.