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For someone who doesn’t care language, what’s the difference between this and the original diagrams tool?
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Curious, what's wrong with graphviz?
I've used it for auto generated diagrams of our code. Partly because it's what I know, partly because, surprisingly, there isn't anything free similar. It's crashy for moderate sized graphs. And doesn't have quite enough layout and styling features. It's good enough but I'm on the lookout for something better.
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I've used it for auto generated diagrams of our code. Partly because it's what I know, partly because, surprisingly, there isn't anything free similar. It's crashy for moderate sized graphs. And doesn't have quite enough layout and styling features. It's good enough but I'm on the lookout for something better.
Have you engaged the graphviz team? Maybe the don't have graphs of that size as part of their test suite, and if you could donate some samples, they would fix the "crashy" behaviour. No software should ever be "crashy" - it's buggy and bugs need to be corrected.
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> I really don't see the point in having to write a Go snippet to describe the architecture: in the end you're providing only data as an input. Writing a program to generate the diagram is similar to writing a program to generate your infrastructure which is exactly what you do in "infrastructure as code". If your infrastructure is simple then you may not need infrastructure as code. The same can be said for diagrams…
It all depends on the context, you're right. I was more thinking about my use case without considering all of the possible use cases such as Infrastructure as Code, which this project seems more suited for. My use case is to create simple explanatory diagrams about a concept / idea rather than a real-world scenario: in those cases, I always end up using Draw.io. This causes me to waste a lot of time dragging and drop…
What's the benefit of coding a visual diagram over drawing it? I was at first thinking of automated verification rules that force your diagram to commute over a set of rules you specify but even drawing tools can specify this. Any people who diagram a lot have an opinion on this?
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One thing I like about textual diagramming tools (in code like this project or in a markup dsl) is I can version control and diff changes.
Fair! Do you build workflows around the diffs themselves (collaborate, review, update)? I can already put my svgs in version control and have history/versions. But I've never felt compelled to look at a textual diff of viz code.
SVG is lower level than I'd want to do this with though - instead of comparing things like individual paths and fill colors, a dsl at the right abstraction level lets you compare things like adding a server to a load balancer in a network topology diagram.
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Is this tool beyond creating diagrams? If not, I don’t grasp the point of porting, writing the diagram is like scripting, for which python is arguably a better choice. I hope this isn’t a trend similar to Atwood's Law: “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.”
Its a funny law but ultimately people like using the tools and languages they know. And most languages are good. So id expect youd see most things ported to most languages excepting where they are prohibitivley expensive. Also making things is fun.
It absolutely has to created node_modules in center of your source code, and populate it with 120MB of files. If you want to just package it somehow so to make it more like cli tool (like you could do with awscli for example) then tough luck it will break in many weird ways.
It's like the nodejs people threw out everything we learned in decades and are reinventing the wheel. Yes it works great if you have your own project in a single directory and working on it, but any other use case is a horrible experience.
Now if this could read something like say Terraform and be able to (if all your infra was defined in terraform) keep infrastructure diagrams in sync with production instead of the idealized thing we think they are that’d be reallly cool.
I have gotten really used to drawing all my technical diagrams with Inkscape (system arch, sequence diagrams, product roadmaps, etc). Granted, it's labor intensive and hard to justify the learning curve just for technical diagrams but I find that once you have built the muscle memory and a good mental map, it's not that slow (and encourages concision and good abstraction to make the diagram simpler) and superior to a…
I've made diagrams for my talks in both style (with code and with Inkscape or, these days, Lucidchart). Writing code to generate diagrams had a much larger setup cost but once I had it going, iterating on the diagrams became much easier. I had a talk about radix trees[1] where I wrote some Haskell code that could take trees and generate diagrams from them. Getting the code right in the first place took a few hours bu…
Now if this could read something like say Terraform and be able to (if all your infra was defined in terraform) keep infrastructure diagrams in sync with production instead of the idealized thing we think they are that’d be reallly cool.
Any chance you can provide an example of Terraform source and visualization? I'm interested in it for my own project. Thanks!