Makie has grown to become a very powerful tool and an important part of the Julia ecosystem. A few Makie features are especially worth highlighting:
1. Using the "observable" system, it's quite easy to put together simple GUIs with toggles, sliders, etc. This is really nice for interactive data visualization, real time physical simulations, etc.
2. One can (for the most part) smoothly switch between various backend options. GLMakie is the high-performance OpenGL backend. WGLMakie builds on WebGL and can be used in browser context, which is nice in Jupyter notebooks, or in HPC scenarios where the calculation is being performed on a remote cluster. CairoMakie allows for exporting publication-quality vector graphics.
3. A couple years ago there were severe issues with "time to first plot". I'm happy to say that this issue is now (almost completely) fixed! The initial Makie installation will take a couple minutes to precompile and cache object files. But after that, the time-to-first plot in a new Julia session only takes about 1 second.
