TALA Is Open-Source

ashiban

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

azriel91

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)

ChrisArchitect

Related: D2 Is Non-Profit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589768

bbkane

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

boguscoder

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

ricardobeat

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.

Taikonerd

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.

aidenn0

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.

sotilrac

I'm so happy about this, we desperately need better auto layout. I'll be adding it to Daedalus