Describe the functionality you would like to see.

An alternative plotting backend would be nice, even if it is only experimental. The main goal would be to add support for a GPU based backend which potentially would be much faster than matplotlib especially for larger plots/ images with more that 512 x512 pixels.

I've been playing around with fastplotlib and it looks quite nice, isn't based on OpenCL and while fairly new seems to have quite a few of the features we need. It also isn't terribly hard to add features/ performance optimizations are largely "under the hood".

Maybe just to scope out what a feature complete package would need.

Plotting

• Scale bars Adding a Scale Bar Widget fastplotlib/fastplotlib#743
• 2D Plotting
• 1D Plotting
• Log Scales
• 2D Plotting with non linear scales
• Click Events/ arrow events

ROIs

• Rectangle Selector
• Circle Selector Making a Circle Selector fastplotlib/fastplotlib#742
• Polygon Selector

Markers

• Points plotting
• Texts Plotting
• Lines Plotting
• Custom Marker plotting
• Inset figure plotting (not supported as a collection)

Describe the context

Even if everything isn't implemented we could start thinking about what it would take. I think it's actually not terribly much beyond some basic abstraction with the plotting code. The other nice thing this would add is a very responsive plotting option in the browser usingjupyter_rfb which would be quite nice.