Does anyone know what the clipboard tool that was being used in the youtube demo is?
I believe FlyCut.
D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
51–60 of 130 posts
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps then "Preview/Beta online service" should be part of the Headline/title.
Perhaps reading the article is a useful way to get information? If the headline contained everything everyone would conceivably want to know, it would be the article. It's not like the headline was misleading: "a new $tool" is a common phrase for software in alpha and beta stages.
So, to you, "Tool" or "Language" do NOT imply that you can use it independently of a specific online service?
I mean, I agree, that "new" is marketing speak for "alpha/beta", but -to me- there is a difference between a "language/tool" and a "Single-Vendor-WebService". Or is my understanding of the semantics of the English language outdated?
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#53Mermaid also does this, and is integrated in github/gitea/gitlab. To try it out, just open a new github issue and add ```mermaid graph TD; A-->B; A-->C; B-->D; C-->D; ``` Or try the live editor: https://mermaid.live/
Mermaid has heaps of problems. I discovered this when I tried extending it myself.
Firstly, neither its parser and its visualiser can be extracted from the library. You can't process a grammar on a backend and then render out an SVG. You can't generate an SVG as part of a CLI tool - not without spinning up a web browser in automation mode.
Secondly, the grammar is messy. Really really awkward. Flowcharts are OK because they were the first Mermaid usecase, but other grammars are quite weirdly written, brittle, and try to be a mismash of other DSLs. Which in turn leads to very awkward token choices to avoid stepping on the toes of parts that are UML-like, parts that are DOT-like, etc etc
My impression reading Mermaid's issues is that it was built from scratch by a JS developer who hadn't any previous experience with DSLs, parsers, or language design, and largely learned as he went along. That's acceptable for a proof of concept. But as a finished product Mermaid is a lumbering mess
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#54The last question in the FAQ makes it clear that this can only be used in the context of their account-based online tool. Their free offering literally says "3 diagrams". Above this, the FAQ tries to compare their tool to Mermaid, Graphviz, PlantUML which are all open source, locally runnable, etc. Their comparison totally skips the fact that, because D2 can only be used in their service, a broad number of use cases…
People seem to be missing that this is a preview, not a product (yet). And that: "When the language is more stable, we intend to open source D2. This will happen sometime in 2022."
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Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#55Looks cool. Any inherent limitations or performance issues with graphs that are very large? (20M+ elements)
Unless you use instanced rendering via some GPU API it's going to take some galaxy brain code to make that work.
Forget about rendering, just doing the layout would be extremely challenging.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#56Does this use Stable Diffusion?
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#57Hi all, creator of D2 here. I posted this on Reddit to get some feedback but was hoping to improve the docs and offer a playground environment before posting on HackerNews. Ah well. I wanted to clarify some things: 1. D2 will be open source and usable outside of Terrastruct. Terrastruct will remain the best interface to D2, with bidirectional updates from GUI, but we already have vscode and vim plugins ready for loca…
By the way do you have a BNF grammar (or something more of a formal spec for this?). The cheat sheet does look good though.
No unfortunately not yet. The docs are like 75% caught up to all the language right now and it's still changing not infrequently, so we'll make some formal specs once it's stable. This reveal caught us off guard =).
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#58I am taken a little aback by the name. There is, of course, already the D programming language, which has even had a major version number of 2 for quite some time. It also brings to mind the JavaScript library d3, which, while not strictly for making diagrams, can easily lend itself to the purpose. Calling this thing "D2" seems potentially confusing.
Calling it now, someone will make a tool for automatic documentation of R codebases, and call it R2D2.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#59The last question in the FAQ makes it clear that this can only be used in the context of their account-based online tool. Their free offering literally says "3 diagrams". Above this, the FAQ tries to compare their tool to Mermaid, Graphviz, PlantUML which are all open source, locally runnable, etc. Their comparison totally skips the fact that, because D2 can only be used in their service, a broad number of use cases…
Those tools are mature 10-20+ year and we're just getting feedback for our little ol' alpha born ~yesterday. The limitations are temporary -- we are working on an offline, locally runnable experience (it's in the roadmap), but, alas, engineering bandwidth of a 6 person team. edit: I've updated the docs to make this clear
How is this different/better than, say, Mermaid?
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#60Something was posted here recently in a similar light - does anyone recall what it was?
there are a few of these tools but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31273777 was a recent reference to https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/