`jgd` as an alternative graphics device

[grantmcdermott]

Hi folks.

I've been working on a lightweight R graphics device called jgd (link). The core idea is to serialize R plotting operations into JSON and then display them in an external renderer. The underlying R package is mostly written in pure C, has no external dependencies, and plugs directly into R's C API.

More relevant for vscode-R users, however, is that fact that the primary application right now is an embedded plot view in VS Code. The extension itself is pretty small, but has the core "nice UX" features that I want (cycling through plots, automatic resizing, export features, etc.). It also plays well with the main vscode-R extension.

Here's a screen grab:

I'm sharing this background with the vscode-R repo for a couple of reasons:

• I would welcome additional testers (esp. on Windows)
• It provides a lightweight alternative to existing R plotting options in VS Code and plays nicely with vscode-R
• Longer-term, if the community agrees and it survives wider testing, I would be happy to incorporate jgd's functionality into the main R extension code base. At a minimum, it would be nice to add a r.plot.useJgd setting (similar to httpgd). At a maximum, and not to be presumptuous, but perhaps we could fully integrate jgd into the main R extension, since this would enable nice plotting functionality out of the gate.

More details are available at the jgd repo: https://github.com/grantmcdermott/jgd