This PR stems from#19694. It implements a new animation classSVGFuncAnimation that exclusively creates SVG animations. Because of this restriction, it can reuse components that are common between frames and thus only minimally updates the SVG dom for each frame. In my tests, I found that this results in a speedup of up to 30x and about half the memory footprint as compared to the standardFuncAnimation.

It's meant to be (almost) a drop-in forFuncAnimation and can be used as such:

np.random.seed(0)size=10defupdate_line(num,data,line):line.set_data(range(num),data[:num])returnline,fig=plt.figure()data=np.random.rand(size)l,=plt.plot([], [],'r-')plt.xlim(0,size-1)plt.ylim(0,1)anim=SVGFuncAnimation(fig,update_line,range(1,size+1),fargs=(data,l))

I have a few other exampleshere and a basic benchmarkhere.

This is a new feature (and my first PR here) so I suspect there'll be some discussion about what the proper API for this is and quite a few things to correct/fix. This is part of the reason I have yet to write more extensive docs. Any and all feedback is welcomed!

PR Checklist

Has pytest style unit tests (andpytest passes).
IsFlake 8 compliant (runflake8 on changed files to check).
New features are documented, with examples if plot related.
Documentation is sphinx and numpydoc compliant (the docs shouldbuild without error).
Conforms to Matplotlib style conventions (installflake8-docstrings and runflake8 --docstring-convention=all).
New features have an entry indoc/users/next_whats_new/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).
API changes documented indoc/api/next_api_changes/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).

jklymak added topic: animation backend: svg status: needs comment/discussionneeds consensus on next step labels

May 3, 2021

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jklymak commentedMay 3, 2021

Perhaps give us a mock example in the PR description?

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May 3, 2021

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jungerm2 commentedMay 3, 2021•
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It looks like the signature of functool's lru_cache changed after py37. Should be a quick fix, I'll push an update to this shortly.

EDIT: It's fixed now. All tests pass 👍

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QuLogic commentedMay 4, 2021

What makes this specifically need to be anAnimation, and not aWriter?

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jungerm2 commentedMay 4, 2021

Originally, instead of hooking into the SVG backend to intercept the frame data, I had it parse every frame separately which meant it couldn't be just aWriter. The current code is more simple so we might be able to make it inherit fromMovieWriter orFileMovieWriter.

One of the subtleties with making it aWriter would be whether or not to extend theHTMLWriter or simply create its own class. After all the output format of theSVGFunAnimation is pretty similar to the output of theHTMLWriter. It uses a similar jshtml output except that the js edits the SVG dom instead of swapping out an img tag. We'd need a separateto_svghtml or maybe just add an option to theto_jshtml call if we make this a writer.

jklymak assignedtacaswell

May 15, 2021

jklymak requested a review fromtacaswell

May 15, 2021 15:38

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jklymak commentedMay 15, 2021

@tacaswell, you encouraged this to be PRd, so I'll ping you to shepherd this through if you have the bandwidth?@jungerm2 did a lot of work here, and it seems reasonable to me, but its a lot of new code...

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tacaswell commentedMay 15, 2021•
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I will not realistically have bandwidth to look at this until next week.

@jungerm2 If you do not hear from me by May 26 please ping me!

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jungerm2 commentedMay 17, 2021

Will do, Thanks! Let me know if there's anything I can help with too (time permitting). But as@QuLogic mentioned it might make more sense to make this into aWriter, I'm just not totally sure how that would work...

jklymak marked this pull request as draft

May 22, 2021 15:50

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jungerm2 commentedJun 1, 2021

@tacaswell were you able to take a look at this PR yet?

github-actionsbot added the status: needs rebase label

Oct 18, 2022

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melissawm commentedJun 15, 2023

Hi@jungerm2 - I'm sorry this fell through the cracks, are you interested in continuing this work? If so, please mark the PR as ready for review and let us know if you need help with the rebase, we haveinstructions for that here. Thanks!

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jungerm2 commentedJun 15, 2023

Hey, thanks for getting back to me! It's been a while since I've worked on this but still think it would add value to matplotlib, but it seems there are quite a few merge conflicts now. And as I've said this might be better implemented as aWriter class. It would be great to get some feedback on this.

If there's sufficient interest I might pick this back up but don't have the bandwidth to merge this in at the moment.