Makie.jl VS Gadfly.jl

Just look at this lotenz attractor https://docs.makie.org/stable/

There does exist some code for reading glyph geometry from fonts - you can find some of it in the Makie source directory: eg https://github.com/MakieOrg/Makie.jl/blob/master/src/bezier.jl - you can see that there's quite a lot though...

You'll want Makie.

Thanks! Looks like the Julia Makie library can do graphics and gui widgets as well -https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Makie.jl

There was also this recent thread where some folks were talking up Makie.jl, for which there is apparently also a Grammar-of-Graphics-style wrapper called AlgebraOfGraphics.jl.

If you're looking for native then Makie.jl is probably your best bet. It's still a little underdocumented and the integrations with the rest of the ecosystem are still incomplete, but it's a pretty amazing plotting library. Fast with easy GPU acceleration, good interactivity and animations (great for making GUIs), and easy to extend.

How tricky or hard would it be to create nice looking plots from that? Something like https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Makie.jl but more low level.

I haven't heard anything about that. They had their latest release in October, 2021 according to GitHub (but I don't follow it very closely, so maybe they have mentioned somewhere that they are winding down?).