Comment by chamakits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chamakits | Hacker News Reader

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First, I have to comment on that diagram:

That diagram is the most interesting representation of a diagram I have ever seen. Do you have a tool to generate these for you, or was it hand crafted for this post? If it's a tool, is it available anywhere? If this is a built out tool, I would use this tool all the time.

On the article itself:

This is the most interesting type of posts about choosing Rust. Very balanced and aware that Rust gives a lot of upsides, but compared to other alternatives there are measurable downsides as well.

I think the biggest trade-off that they identified (and I've also gotten the impression from writing Rust on my own time, not for work) is the relative immaturity of the ecosystem, in as far as libraries available, and amount of developers supporting some of these libraries. What makes me hopeful, is that as a stable language (post 1.0) Rust is still relatively young. And you can definitely see things improving, with the community growing, more libraries propping up, and also gathering around specific libraries.

> That diagram is the most interesting representation of a diagram I have ever seen.

Thank you! We worked really hard on it.

> Do you have a tool to generate these for you, or was it hand crafted for this post? If it's a tool, is it available anywhere?

It was hand-made for this blog post. The diagram itself was drawn in a vector graphics editor and exported as SVG. Then, using web inspector tools to find which visual box corresponded to some line of svg markup, classes/ids were added to the items we cared about. Next came writing prose for each component. Finally, a bit of JavaScript and a CSS animation makes it come alive.

> If this is a built out tool, I would use this tool all the time.

Me too!

Fantastic work on the entire post then. Great content, and presentation. Looking forward to reading future posts like these as well.

> The diagram itself was drawn in a vector graphics editor and exported as SVG.

Which vector graphics editor did you use?

Not sure what they used but on Windows I would recommend Inkscape (perhaps an obvious choice).

My obvious choice would be Visio or PowerPoint.

Powerpoint can’t export to SVG though, can it?

Not the version that I own, but then there is Visio or the other vector formats that can be converted to SVG.

I seldom use SVG, because it is failed vector format. You still cannot guarantee an image will work properly across all browsers (desktop, mobile devices) or vector design tools.

PS or PDF have more chance of working across tools.

I, too, have been looking for a tool that will generate clean, styleable structural diagrams, but I haven't found the perfect one yet.

The best I've found is Mermaid [1], which has a Graphviz-like grammar. Unlike Graphviz, it can generate very clear, orthogonally laid-out diagrams with minimal effort, and it works better because it's designed for flowcharting (it supports classic flow diagrams, too). On the other hand, because it was designed for flowcharting, the automatic layout can generate less reasonably clutter when you have many entities with many connections. In particular, if you tried to generate the OP's diagram, I suspect it would accidentally lay out the boxes in a way that made some arrows cross — but I didn't actually try.

I've been considering writing a better tool for some time, but the layout is a hard theoretical nut to crack, and I'm not sure I would be up for it. The best idea I've had so far is to use genetic algorithms with some a fitness measurement that promotes cleanness (overlapping lines, density, horizontal/vertical extent and so on).

[1] https://knsv.github.io/mermaid/

Try https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

(not affiliated, it just does this very well)

That's a manual tool, though. I personally use Illustrator whenever the need comes for something that is to be shiny, but my desire is for an automatic layout tool that can be driven from a DSL, Graphviz-style.

Aside from efficiency (lots of diagrams for documentation or blogging), one benefit would be the ability to enforce a single theme (font, colours, etc.) across many diagrams, and push out new versions by tweaking the styles. Illustrator can't do that, and OmniGraffle is very weak at it.

I tried using Sketch, which has a support for reusable symbols, but it's pretty terrible at it.

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