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I am struggling to understand the difference between XPlot and F# Charting. Each is developed in the context of FsLab, each provides an easy way to display various sorts of charts. Even the syntax seems to be nearly the same.

Maybe it depends on what I want to chart?

In my case I simply would like to display several lines in one chart. I.e. something like enter image description here

My application has no GUI per se. I just would like to open windows with the charts every now and then while the main application continues execution - or depending on the application's mode, just dump the charts to files.

Community
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Friedrich Gretz
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F# Charting is implemented as a wrapper over System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting allowing to use (almost) all of Windows Forms charting capabilities. A cross-platform variant of F# Charting for Mono/.Net implements the same set of capabilities using Gtk.

XPlot is much more feature-rich chart plotting solution based on Google Charts and Plotly javascript libraries, which is cross-platform.

So, if you need just elementary chart combinations and use F# on Windows your best native platform bet is F# Charting.

Gene Belitski
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    Right, but if I do not care about the underlying technology and I want to be cross-platform it sounds as if there is no difference, is there? (Assuming I use the Gtk Version of F# Charting) – Friedrich Gretz Feb 22 '18 at 16:22
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    @FriedrichGretz: Using set theory terms there is not much difference between the two for the _intersection_ of features; `F# Charting` features can be considered as a _subset_ of `XPlot` features. – Gene Belitski Feb 22 '18 at 17:33
  • Is there a difference with respect to public vs private data and whether the data is kept local or sent to the cloud? My sense- I may be wrong- is that XPlot involves sending data to the cloud which may not be suitable in all situations. – Robert Sim Apr 25 '18 at 07:07
  • @RobertSim: Without going into what do you exactly mean by `public/private` and `local/cloud` - both `XPlot.GoogleCharts` and `XPlot.Plotly` have successfully produced simple charts when being running on a box without any network connection. – Gene Belitski Apr 26 '18 at 13:58
  • I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that those features require a network connection and sent your data points to a public server. Thanks for setting me straight. – Robert Sim Apr 26 '18 at 16:02