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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

There are also plugins for graphviz, which is a more structured language. I use it for documenting states in my code, e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tintinwe... and https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=joaompin.... Since graphviz is old, there are also command line tools to render the output.

For more information about graphviz: https://graphviz.org/

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Why is it that on HN when somebody posts a link to a cool project, the top comment is systematically something like "here's an alternative"? Can we just talk about the posted link instead of just stealing the light?

Personally I think this isn't a good way to look at it. Nothing exists in a void and to contextualize things, it's often useful to compare it to other similar things. In the startup world, it's often explained in the vein of "Uber for X" type of companies. Since Graphviz is one of the oldest and most widely used pieces of software in this space it makes sense to compare any new developments against it.

Oh don't get me wrong, comparisons are good. This is not a comparison though, it's a redirection, and this is very rude.

It seems more like a comparison to me, although not a very objective one.

I disagree.

Either the OP shared because they found a useful tool and wanted others to be able to know too, in which case sharing another related tool is in the spirit of what OP intended.

Or, OP wanted to use HN as a sales platform to pitch their work. In this case, sorry pal but HN is not your personal marketing megaphone. You want to put something out into the public here, you should expect it to be scrutinized and compared against alternatives. IMO, HN as a platform should put readers first, not authors.

Edit: Just want to add that in this particular case, I think both the draw.io and graph viz plugins are awesome. Love to see these kinds of tools.

On the contrary, if you are looking for ‘diagrams as code’ you likely don’t mean postscript, SVG, or XML of arbitrary lines and shapes.

You likely mean something structured and readable, like ‘literate diagramming’.

The top comment’s first phrase explained that rationale.

What is rude in this thread is your attempt to deny relevant information from these interested in diagram tools.

When I open threads like these I am mostly interested in:

- Interesting features that this tool has

- Experiences from the developers of this and similar tools

- Alternatives as well as their pros/cons

Meanwhile you want to deny that experience from me in order to not hurt something as irrelevant as the OPs pride.

I'd say that's one of the top reasons I like HN, as you can see what other people are using. Most of the time when I search the web for comparison between x and y, I find little useful info.

Isn't that a good thing? If a thing does X, I'd very much like to know what other things do X as well to try and understand how they differ.

Does the comment above give you any insight of how they differ? That would be useful, but it's not the case

Yes it does. I often use draw.io. I've heard of graphviz but never looked into it. I found the original comment very useful because now I know:

- draw.io and graphviz have similar use cases (otherwise it wouldn't have been mentioned)

- Both have VS code plugins

- graphviz is a more structured language

- graphviz is more mature

- graphviz can be used from command line

Theoretically, drawio can be used from command line too! (it involves puppeteer though)

> instead of just stealing the light?

because HN isn't a place to merely advertise a product to gain traction and marketing. These alternatives and comments on other competitors shed light on the entire eco system, and prevent astroturfing as well as group think. It may even widen somebody's lack of knowledge.

HN isn't a place to merely advertise a product to gain traction and marketing

Today I learned.

Congratulations! Now you'll enjoy HN more!

There's nuance in that. HN is absolutely a mere marketing channel for (current) YC companies. The irony.

The irony.

Is it, though? I feel like lately you could ask five different people what HN “is” and get ten different answers.

Just ask dang :) Oh btw I meant YC founders don't use HN other than for marketing..

This can only serve as a service. I see no way this is a bad thing.

I'd rather read about someone's experience with the tool mentioned. If they prefer something else, I hope they share that and why. The graphviz thing in particular feels like someone who has an interest in the future of graphviz hijacks any alternative to say that graphviz exists.

That’s not a comparison. Two different purposes for these tools. I use graphviz and I’m glad there is also support for it

I, for one, find them useful. Part of the discussion about a tool is also being aware and potentially discuss alternatives.

Agreed. I’ve always found it rude and demeaning.

I clicked through on the comments to this because I'm looking for something similar to Draw.io and now I know about Graphviz as well. Once again, serendipity provides.

Even if a particular project isn't that interesting to me, the landscape surrounding the project may be. The community here provides some context for the world this project lives in and that's pretty valuable, IMHO.

I can't say I agree with you 100%, but I see your point. That is part of the reason I don't stop at the top comment. There's usually a lot of good information further down as well.

Graphviz has been the old standby forever. I had an internship in 1999 where my mentor used graphviz to debug the compiler he was working on. Everyone should have this tool in their debugging tricks library.

I'm actually doing the same thing right now. I had been using a textual output to make sure my AST was correct, but that is a real pain. Graphviz made it extremely easy it is so much easier to read.

Could you expand on the graphviz use in dbg context (or ref it)?

Is it to draw the call graph? How it's actualy done, with printfs or some lib?

I use it with kcachegrind for profiling, the source being output from xdebug.

https://xdebug.org/docs/profiler

http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/Home.html

You can use it for whatever you want. Instead of dumping text to a log file, you can dump out graph nodes and connection info to a dot file instead, to then be laid out and rendered into a graph by dotty or whatever else you want to use. It doesn’t require any extra libraries.

I googled for "dotty" mentioned downthread (didn't know about this tool) and found this PDF:

https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf.

Section 3.2.2 ldbx, on page 19, (21 in PDF), gives an example of using graphs for debugging a C application.

I use asciidoc extension by the same author. It works well with kroki.io so you can do a wide variety of diagrams (including graphviz, plant uml and others)

https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-vscode/blob/maste...

How do the both of you make graphviz diagrams look decent?

I often resign myself to using it for generating the first structure, and then laying it out better in an svg editor. Of course that way I lose some of the maintainability of it.

Yeah really looking for a tool that produces output as nice as e.g. Dat documentation diagrams

You're looking for a human illustrator, then. :D

Seconded.

I had to brush off Graphviz today; I dumped a dependency graph from CMake into a series of dot diagrams, and now I'm trying to figure out how to force the SVG generated by dot to space itself out - by default, the edges are so densely packed that you can't see anything on the diagram :/.

The draw.io desktop app [0] also a CLI for output rendering.

[0] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop

Is that a 721 token in there? :blush:

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