tl;dr - I think criterion-plot could be useful to the broader ecosystem if somebody wanted to maintain it, but I don’t. If you do, please continue reading.
When I took over maintenance of Criterion.rs I marked criterion-plot as a “private implementation detail” because I didn’t want to commit to defining and maintaining a widely-used plotting crate as well as a benchmarking crate. I hoped that a pure-Rust plot-rendering crate would appear and then I could drop criterion-plot and use that instead and save myself the maintenance effort.
Two years later, that hasn’t happened. Rust still has no widely-used plot-rendering crate, pure-Rust or otherwise. I think that criterion-plot could be that crate, but I still don’t want to maintain it. Indeed, some folks have used it for that already, despite my dire warnings about API instability.
For that reason, I’d like to invite interested people or teams to fork criterion-plot and create a new, actively-maintained and supported crate based on it.
The reason for forking the crate rather than transferring ownership of the existing Crates.io name is mostly just to avoid risk. This way, I can wait and see how the successor crate(s) develop and if community-consensus forms before I switch Criterion.rs over to using it. It also means I can avoid an event-stream incident without actually having to vet the new owner(s).
For those who are unaware, criterion-plot is a crate that provides a rather nice (if somewhat verbose) interface for describing plots (eg. line charts, bar graphs, and so on), generating a gnuplot script and shelling out to gnuplot to turn the script into an image. It’s used to generate all of the plots in Criterion.rs’ HTML reports.
