Is egui a best fit for animating an AoC puzzle visualisation?

[griffrawk]

egui noob here. I'm trying to work out if something I want to do with some data is feasible.

I have a 2d array of data (50 * 50) in an AoC 2024 Day 15 puzzle that currently I'm animating at each stage using plotters, and then I assemble the resulting PNGs into a movie.

I'd like instead to do the animation direct to screen (though I'm aware plotters has screen backends...), but in such a way as to not need to redraw each and every block on a canvas for every iteration. Quite a lot of the blocks represent unmovable walls which never move, but boxes can move. Currently, having to redraw all 2500 blocks kills the performance in my plotters code, even running --profile release.

Would I be on the right lines to use egui to represent each box or wall as some sort of custom widget that my code moves about (is that possible, and am I going to run into problems with widget placement?), and so let egui work out if something needs redrawing, or would it be easier to just draw boxes on a canvas?

Is egui even the right tool, or would egui_plot be more suitable, or is this a job for something like bevy thus storing each of my blocks as an entity, with which I've a little more experience, but feels like overkill for something this simple.

[griffrawk]

Turns out it's more than capable for what I wanted. I setup a canvas to plot the data and animate the process, and it's... ahem, blazingly fast.