D2 Is Non-Profit | Hacker News Reader

D2 Is Non-Profit

d2lang.com

65 pointsalixanderwang24 comments

Really happy to see this - A few months ago the D2 `play` site looked like it was down or unreachable and I was pretty bummed. It came back, but it did make me wonder about the future of the project - awesome to see that TALA will be released, sorry to hear the company behind it is shutting down.

Just to be clear, this doesn't seem to be based on Walter Bright's D language. Maybe people already know that, but I didn't.

It's pretty clear when you visit the website though.

It isn't since there is not much about what it is!

The first sentence of the main site is "D2: Declarative Diagramming - A modern language that turns text to diagrams", followed by multiple code snippets and the resulting diagrams.

I click the thingy and don't see that, I know D2 as the big language split for Dlang, I click around, I still can't tell what this is.

It's diagramming software? Like plantuml or mermaid? It says it right on the tin and with all the examples.

> D2 thus far has been a product of handcrafted code. That era is over. This next phase of D2 will be driven by AI. By this, I mean that all of my contributions will use AI.

This is an interesting twist. While I get the rationale, I remain a bit concerned. I do hope the project remains successful, d2 is great!

This is going to be really interesting.

What does the future of new programming languages look like in the era of AI?

I'm confused - why is hackclub (a project dedicated to teens) financing this project maintained by an openai infra person?

that's what i'm thinking, this doesn't seem to be a teenager to me based off of them saying that they've been programming for 10 years ( though i suppose they could have started when they were <= 8 years old ), but i can't really find any information on who exactly the founder is, or why hackclub would sponsor them.

They sponsor many popular software projects unrelated to their mission. It helps bring awareness to what they do and they also take a 7% cut of donations to fund their operations. I probably could've elaborated on this more in the post. See https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit, which goes more in depth and is how I first became aware of them!

So is TALA[1] continuing to be developed and/or being open sourced?

[1] https://github.com/terrastruct/TALA

Yes, I'm planning to open-source it tomorrow.

In the post it says "I'll be making posts as TALA and D2 Studio are released." so I assume/hope so?

Open source announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604150

> D2 thus far has been a product of handcrafted code. That era is over. This next phase of D2 will be driven by AI. By this, I mean that all of my contributions will use AI. I welcome AI contributions and will use AI to review your AI, etc. The exception is writing -- I will author all blog posts and comms without AI.

Really cool, seems like the right balance.

Happy to hear this. Is go the right language for d2 or could it be worth considering js? The WASM solution seems pretty heavyweight, and it would be amazing to have it rendered natively in markdown hosting sites like GitHub.

How does D2 handle larger diagrams with lots of connections?

This has been my issue with PlantUML and Mermaid. The routing tends to blow up when you have a bunch of lines that run out to a thing (i.e. rather than snaking together they just go everywhere).

Yeah unfortunately it doesn't handle hypergraphs IIRC, i.e. one edge going from a single node to multiple other nodes.

Oh, does that already integrate with GitHub? Need to check how it deals with layouts and arrows in comparison to Mermaid

I like the mermaid sequence diagrams more. But D2 for everything else. No GitHub integration yet though.

Tangential, do LLMs generate D2 code as easily as Mermaid and do tools like Github and Confluence render them?

>do LLMs generate D2 code as easily as Mermaid

Yes

>and do tools like Github and Confluence render them?

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