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Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

spidermonkey.dev

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Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#11

Post by a_t48 »

nirava wrote: post #9

anyone working on this space easily gets a +1! I have struggled with code to diagram tools for a while [mermaid and graphviz], and usually return to figjam when I need the readabilty and aesthetics. graph-viz is MASSIVE and a binary. mermaid requires the browser's svg rendering system to work. I just need something that builds diagrams from description easily ...

I used mermaid for https://basisrobotics.tech/2024/11/24/basis-robot-02-softwar... (autogenerated) and it worked out pretty well, but notably I wasn't trying to handle loops. There have to be mermaid to png renderers out there. Beyond that, I view svg/html output as a huge advantage - I can restyle it and it's copyable.

Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#12

Post by IshKebab »

This is great. I've been trying to generate diagrams for HDL hierarchies and neither Graphviz nor ELK can do a remotely good job. In fact I've never got good results from Graphviz for any graphs over a handful of nodes. I think it just isn't actually very good. But it has such huge mindshare even if there was a better option I wouldn't be able to find it.

Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#13

Post by xlii »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #5
xlii wrote: post #3

This is a concept I'm working around with Microdiagram (microdiagram.com) prototype. i.e. having a general purpose diagram/graph layout is hellishly difficult, but most of the diagrams/charts follow much simpler rules, thus it's much easier to have N languages, each for 1 type of diagram, than 1 language for N types of diagrams.

Sounds intriguing. What is an example of a chart and its language that you have designed so far?

The Piano chart on prototype is an example, that's for discussing piano keys and chords on basic level.

I already implemented (in other prototype) diagram for event calculus (i.e. consideration of event stream through addition of new events like rollback, modify etc.)

On paper I have designs for point-in-time designs, scenario divergence and also some fun ones like a bingo card template. Diagrams are one thing, but there's also a design for collaboration and play-replay capabilities.

That being said, that's only a design right now with a simple prototype on the website :)

Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#15

Post by rapnie »

nirava wrote: post #9

anyone working on this space easily gets a +1! I have struggled with code to diagram tools for a while [mermaid and graphviz], and usually return to figjam when I need the readabilty and aesthetics. graph-viz is MASSIVE and a binary. mermaid requires the browser's svg rendering system to work. I just need something that builds diagrams from description easily ...

You might also check out D2, which had a recent run on the HN front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45707539

Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#19

Post by zvr »

To be more accurate, the comparison is not with Graphviz, but with dot(1).

Graphviz is a visualization framework and it includes many layout engines, implementing different algorithms: dot, neato, fdp, sfdp, circo, twopi, ...

It would be great if this new custom algorithm were to be contributed to Graphviz.

Re: Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

#20

Post by stefs »

zem wrote: post #16

I would love to see this evolve into a more general purpose control flow graph viewer - pretty much any language implementation would find it a great debugging tool. it's probably most of the way there already.

this tool works by replacing the "general purpose" algorithm by specializing it, which made it less general purpose but simpler and more efficient ... and now there's the request to make it more general purpose.

(it's a joke! and the joke is that those are two different general purpose. but still.)

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