D2

Hi ProductHunt, I'm excited to announce the launch of D2 here. It stands for Declarative Diagramming, and its use case is to turn diagramming from a design tool to a developer tool. Every software engineer and team makes documentation, and diagrams are everyone's favorite visual doc. But all the popular diagramming tools today are design tools (LucidChart, Draw.io, etc). It takes design skills to make a good diagram, and a lot of effort and time to maintain. D2 is a dev tool. You declare your diagram with simple syntax, and it generates the diagram for you. They're just text files, so you can grep, use your IDE, version control, etc. What's the difference between this and predecessors like MermaidJS, PlantUML, and Graphviz? We've made a site that compares: https://text-to-diagram.com. It's a community effort for you to evaluate yourself on the syntax, renders, layouts, and features (the maintainers of MermaidJS themselves have contributed to it). D2 is open source, easily installable on all major OS's (no telemetry), and has an online playground to easily get started and share diagrams (https://play.d2lang.com).