There's an important distinction between 2 categories in architecture diagrams:
1. Free-form. You have an image of what it should look like. It's precise. An algorithm won't be able to get it right.
2. Structured. You just want to represent the relationships in a clean way, and there's a hundred ways to do that acceptably.
Code/text can never replace the former, and free-form ones are always going to have its place. It's too black & white to say all diagrams should be code or not code.
I'm one the authors of a new text-to-diagram tool, and I wouldn't recommend it for all use cases. Example here of free-form vs structured: https://d2lang.com/tour/future#layouts
I had been super excited by the work on d2 (and Tala), the new language for diagrams with automated layout. I'm happy to pay a reasonable price... but their prices are currently five times higher than the cost of a Visio subscription...
A pity, in my month long trial period I used it extensively, and loved it. Crawling back to Plant UML has been all the more painful for it.
I use (and like) D2, although it’s early days and still has a few rough edges. Prefer the syntax versus Mermaid.
It’s open source, though, isn’t it? You can just install locally with brew or whatever, plus the vscode extension and you’re off to the races. You don’t then get the fancy proprietary GUI, though - that’s what you’re referring to?
Thanks! TIL. Will check it out. Dagre seems to have been okay for me, perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing.
UPDATE: Just tried out TALA. I'm in the same boat, interested only in the CLI. It definitely makes everything I've thrown at it look nicer. Would you be willing to expand a little on what you like about it versus Dagre, having had some experience with it?
I totally agree the distinction exists, just wanted to say https://flowchart.fun/ is nice because you can run layout algorithms and then tweak to your liking w/in the same editor
1. Free-form. You have an image of what it should look like. It's precise. An algorithm won't be able to get it right.
2. Structured. You just want to represent the relationships in a clean way, and there's a hundred ways to do that acceptably.
Code/text can never replace the former, and free-form ones are always going to have its place. It's too black & white to say all diagrams should be code or not code.
I'm one the authors of a new text-to-diagram tool, and I wouldn't recommend it for all use cases. Example here of free-form vs structured: https://d2lang.com/tour/future#layouts
We made Terrastruct so you can mix-and-match both, with GUI or code: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/2034296181