[krumbie]

It's in a different category I would say. For the users, ggplot is mostly about the grammar idea, how you assemble plots from data, geoms, etc. Makie is on a lower level, where you create elements like axes, colorbars, legends etc. manually (with convenience methods, where applicable) and plot things like volume plots or line plots to the axes (like in matplotlib or Matlab for example, but with the whole Observables thing for interactivity). However, the packages AlgebraOfGraphics and TidierPlots are just using Makie's plotting infrastructure to layer a more descriptive plot-building engine on top. There should be nothing in principle that ggplot can plot that Makie really can't, because there are only so many 2D primitives, but Makie has a bunch of 3D stuff that you would not use ggplot for, I'm sure.

My biased view as a coauthor of Makie is that Makie's model is cool because you have a much easier time to combine low-level tinkering with high-level descriptive plots this way. I don't know if you've ever tried hacking the ggplot data structures for special use cases but they are more complex or inscrutable than in Makie, I would say.

Of course, ggplot2 has an amazing and mature ecosystem around it, our ecosystem will need time to fill gap after gap.