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There is quite a lot I could say about ROOT, ROOT files, CINT, but I won't.

There's better options. Don't use it unless you are in HEP.




Even then, it tends to be used for everything whether it really needs to or not. I switched to matplotlib for plotting and was much happier/more productive.


What options are better?


Almost anything, to be honest. Matplotlib, R, Matlab, Mathematica etc. are all much nicer. Those will do most things ROOT does and be much less delicate. In a lot of places (especially outside CERN) Matplotlib is taking over where ROOT might have been used, but it's a slow process.

The problem is that ROOT still has a few very specialized features that its users still need and you can't get elsewhere. And there are a ton of legacy analysis tools built on top of it that are difficult to port because of how ROOT is. And a lot of its more extensive users are comfortable with it and have no motive to change (they're busy with being scientists).

I don't know anybody who actually likes ROOT, but it also won't be going away any time soon.


The one thing I am missing in the non-ROOT universe is a powerful fitting framework that can do multidimensional and simultaneous fits in disjoint function domains.




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