Unfortunately the real power ask is creating these offline so they can be embedded and shared in other contexts. I don’t have confidence in gating by a web service. Others have come before you and tried
D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
121–130 of 130 posts
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's why I keep falling back to excalidraw over tools like mermaid with auto-layout. When I need to communicate an idea, often I really need to fuss with layout in order to get my point across, and having the control to drag things around is the only way to get there.
Problem with non automated tools is that editing becomes a big issue since you have to reflow big parts of the diagram to make an addition. This is always my biggest issue with any diagram, the fact that they are evolving.
Oh of course. This is the tradeoff.
That said, over time a diagram's value will diminish regardless if you have auto-layout or not, since the codebase will always outpace documentation.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#123The 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
Maybe starting this way makes sense.
But when the project is trying to compare itself to others, it's only fair to compare based on what's true of the project currently vs what's aspirational. I would guess that for many potential users, the temporary limitations trump most of the stuff in the comparison portion of the FAQ, or the "current shortcomings" section.
And the "Getting Started" section could also say "create an account and familiarize yourself with the existing terrastruct product" or whatever.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#124A problem with semantic markup is when it doesn't do what you want, and you need to wig-wam it. Does this mean you actually wanted presentation markup? Or, since you are trying to convey meaning, does it mean that the semantics aren't rich enough to describe what you mean? In this D2 example ( https://d2-lang.com/assets/images/intro-example-a917149ff3b7... ), the diagram is nicely designed to be centered on the nexus…
before introducing anything, I'd like to see more instances where something needs to be on one side of something else, which I haven't found to be the case in software architecture diagrams.
It's more a research question.
I think it'll be more like ordered keys in JSON - not ordered, according to the spec, but very useful in practice, because easier to compare, locate keys by eye etc. This order might not merely be "the same" as the input happened to be, but an order customarily used - and there might be a semantic reason for that order in the first place, used in some original, non-JSON, representation.
Tenuous.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
actually the effective limit seems to be around 50 nodes
Limit of what exactly? I've made much bigger than 50 nodes SVG-graphs using GV, and styled them with probably 50+ CSS styles and animated more than 50 nodes. So, could you please elaborate?
sorry...I do language development sometimes and GV (dot) has been a godsend for debugging. but at a certain size it just goes sideways and stops being useful and is more of a distraction. to be fair I think this more of a fundamental problem about visual understanding than some screwup in GV
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#126A problem with semantic markup is when it doesn't do what you want, and you need to wig-wam it. Does this mean you actually wanted presentation markup? Or, since you are trying to convey meaning, does it mean that the semantics aren't rich enough to describe what you mean? In this D2 example ( https://d2-lang.com/assets/images/intro-example-a917149ff3b7... ), the diagram is nicely designed to be centered on the nexus…
It's bidirectional if that helps. That's the outstanding feature to me.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems that open sourcing it while it is growing up actually makes more sense. If you want community involvement, ideas, testing, contributions, and so on, then hiding the project source is antithetical to why most people participate in open source in the first place. Open source can mean more than just a license. It should mean more than just gifting a code base once you think you're done. I don't mean to come acr…
thank you for the advice, I do appreciate it, as I'm no expert in open source. one thing to clarify is the idea that we're tying a bow and chucking it across the fence. we'll be far from finished when we open source d2. the intention was to internally seed the initial design (of both the language and the code) -- the first minute of building -- quickly, within a small team. i'm really grateful for all the interest to…
The guidelines for dupes require "substantially new information", IMHO the source absolutely constitutes substantially new information and I look forward to seeing it - I think your video demo was very compelling.
It reminds me of that adage, "Start your business, the tool you build to run your business is now your business"
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#128I've used Plantuml extensively, and still use it a bit, now and then. I don't remember ever needing or even wanting bi-directional editing. There's a lot of interesting things in terms of syntax and semantics here, but I really do not see WHY they are tackling a very hard problem on top of an already not easy one.
As a counterpoint, I also use PlantUML a lot mostly with C4 and I thought the bidirectional interaction looked very cool. I think one benefit might be getting those who don't think in specific syntax and code involved in progress elaboration of the diagrams by using the GUI portion.
Re: D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
In D2 Tour video, at 4:30, they say > When it's more stable, we will be open-sourcing the language . If thats the case, that only the language will be open-sourced, not the visualization, then I'm not entirely sure what that really gets you, beyond perhaps alternative editors? But its the layout algorithms that are actually notable.
Terrastruct engineer here. The visualization will be open source though I can't say for sure yet whether it'll be with our layout algorithm or with https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre.