That's nice; my first impressions of D2 were much worse than they should have been since the default layout engine is pretty terrible for some types of graphs; ELK is a big improvement, and when I tried TALA it was sometimes a big improvement over ELK.

I never purchased TALA though because I don't use D2 at work, and the costs of buying TALA were above my "fun money" amount.

The first few graphs are impressive, it does a much tidier job. The Go queue one is objectively worse - the other versions keep services and users grouped together, as well as a left-to-right flow. The TALA version makes it look more complicated than it is.

Always happy to see D2 on here! In my last job, I had to do several architecture diagrams. Learning D2 took maybe 1 day, and saved me much more time than that.

before discovering d2, I wrote / vibe coded my own diagram generator: https://azriel.im/disposition

then after discovering it, I was too invested in my own project to switch -- the complexity in positioning nodes, routing edges to not draw over labels, taking into account nesting and rank dir gave me an appreciation for how hard these can be, and I kinda wanted my own version (plus other features)

Would integrating/implementing this into graphviz be a good move or mixing wrong things?

Thanks for that. What do you think are the key heuristics / concepts that made it standout or be more appropriate for architecture diagrams?

I just started diagramming with d2- I'll have to try this one out!

Related:

D2 Is Non-Profit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589768

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