A Technique for Drawing Directed Graphs (1993) [pdf]

"How we got 1,500 GitHub stars by mixing time-tested technology with a fresh UI" https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-we-got-1-500-github-star... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567492

Money quotes are:

"But after looking at the source code we found a fatal flaw in this tool: it used Graphviz — a decades old tool written..."

"...After a little research, we found the best library for the task— Cytoscape.js. ..."

... Although the code was much cleaner, the end-result was much worse compared to the original tool. Completely unusable. It appeared that there is no way for cytoscape.js to have edges that don’t cross nodes. "

"...Don’t judge code by it’s age. Especially if it was written by tech giants such as AT&T Labs"

Turns out drawing/visualizing graphs is a really hard problem!

The project seems to have some big problems though. The last stable release was three years ago. 100% reproducible regression bugs for very simple input are not even looked at for years. The build process is so complicated that even the project itself has given up on creating Windows binaries.

The website with the documentation is often down or extremely slow.

The dot graph description language is frustratingly non-composable. Clusters can just barely be used as a crude, limited workaround. A declarative styling mechanism instead of the current imperative state machine approach would remove so much pain.

It's also quite easy to run into crashes.

And still there's nothing better.