Developer builds C library to render histograms directly in the terminal

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A developer built a lightweight C plotting library called plt.c to visualize histograms inside the terminal using Unicode block characters. The project was motivated by a desire to inspect random number distributions without relying on external tools like Python's matplotlib. The library works by bucketing float data into columns, scaling the Y-axis relative to the maximum bucket count, and mapping values to Unicode block characters for sub-row precision. It also handles X-axis scaling by normalizing the data range to fit the configured number of columns. The final library exposes a single function, plt_hist, and was tested with up to 10,000 samples across uniform and normal distributions.

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