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Comment by gtf21 | Hacker News Reader

"Diagrams as Code" has been around a long time (e.g. DOT), not sure what this is really bringing as an improvement, especially as seems to require an account (at least it does when I click "get started" and, as someone else points out, is closed source.

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The npm package is free to use, but closed source until I have bandwidth.

To be clear, you don’t need an account to use the npm package which has all of the functionality to perform layout and rendering. An account is only needed if you want to sync the graph and have a web page to view renderings. This is useful if you’ve instrumented a long lived application with Vizdom, but don’t want to produce a local layout/rendered image because you can’t really “view” it if the service is running in the cloud.

an account. to make a diagram. sigh diagrams-as-a-service. sign. "turn your OCD side project into a business: turn something that people do for free and don't really care that much about into a paid subscription service because..."

I don't think its even OCD side project its just a contrived "how 2 make saas business?"

This seems unjustified. If people want it, they'll buy it. If not, no harm done. If you could e.g. embed the diagrams into Confluence pages, that's something people will definitely pay for.

Ah ok thanks for clarifying!

Looks like this uses DOT? Click on "Editor" at the top

I wrote some functionality to parse DOT to feed it into the layout engine before I got everything working. It was a great way to validate more complex graphs with a DSL that is already prevalent. So for now it’s only present in the webapp.

DOT parsing isn’t part of the npm package, but I’m not totally opposed to include it! It may add 1-2Mb more to the wasm bundle.

> So for now it’s only present in the webapp.

Just so you know, I find this terribly confusing. You see the homepage with your code, then you think "oh, I'll try this editor here..." and then it turns out it's Dot? All examples are written in Dot? Why? Didn't it say "no DSLs"? Didn't it show some TypeScript in the homepage?

It can very easily make people get the wrong idea about what your project is.

TBBQF I have no idea what the value proposition of this project is actually supposed to be.

Edit: It seems to have almost 100% feature overlap with graphviz, but it is a paid SaaS? I don't get it...

Edit 2: This has to be a troll post. "Up to 3 graphs" for free --are you kidding me? I can run `dot` a million times in a second for free

Yeah I’ll admit, that isn’t clear. I used DOT to test it a while back and opened that up for folks who also wanted to mess with DOT, but that isn’t the value prop today.

You can create and render as many graphs as you like with the package offline - only the real-time sync is limited.

> You can create and render as many graphs as you like with the package offline - only the real-time sync is limited.

Why wouldn't I just use graphviz then?

You know what? You’re right! That’s confusing. I’ll try and make it better.

Really good feedback and I’m being serious. Wish I saw that earlier.

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