No it's not on par with bash calling gnu plot as a separate process, because bash and gnuplot ALSO have to convert back and forth between text and binary floating point numbers, and more importantly, as I keep repeating and you refuse to acknowledge, the cost of forking a Unix process is way more expensive than converting between text and binary strings. Not comparable. False equivalence.

And then on top of that, you still have to convert just as many numbers and strings back and forth -- if not more! It's not just the calling and conversion overhead of gnuplot: bash also has to fork off many more "bc" processes that themselves convert text numbers to binary, evaluate expression, then convert binary numbers back to text (and there could be hundreds or thousands of expressions).

While Python with pycairo can draw a pie chart without once converting numbers between text and binary, reading and writing text to a pipe, context switching, or forking off thousands of processes.

The only thing I was imagining about you was that you were listening to what I was saying, but I keep finding I need to repeat myself.