Error when trying to display a figure from GLMakie through juliacall

[findmyway]

Hi,

I'd like to call Julia code from python to display some interactive figures. MWE:

In [1]: from juliacall import Main as jl

In [2]: jl.seval("using GLMakie")

In [3]: jl.Figure()
Out[3]: Figure()

In [4]: f = jl.scatter(jl.rand(2,5))

In [5]: jl.display(f)
Out[5]: GLMakie.Screen(...)

A new Makie window shows up. But nothing in it. And after a while

Any idea how to make it work?

[cjdoris]

My guess is that, since Make is interactive, plotting happens asynchronously. Unfortunately, Julia's event loop only runs while you're actually running Julia code - once you're back in Python it stops.

Maybe calling jl.yield() several times from the prompt will work?

[cjdoris]

My guess was right! I could reproduce your issue. Then by calling getattr(jl, 'yield')() at the Python prompt, the plot was shown. (jl.yield() doesn't work because yield is a Python keyword.)

Furthermore, if you do

while True:
  getattr(jl, 'yield')()

at the Python prompt, the Makie plot is fully responsive.

[findmyway]

Thanks!

[cjdoris]

BTW I'm about to release a new version which has a function juliacall.interactive() which runs the Julia event loop in the background of the Python REPL. I don't know it will work in IPython, I imagine not.

Also, you should probably put a time.sleep(0.001) in that loop I suggested above, so as not to thrash your CPU.