TALA VS d2-docs

This is a problem with the languages, not a fundamental flaw. Manipulating text has a much higher ceiling than drag and drop, in terms of speed and simplicity. Every programmer has their own ecosystem for manipulating text. I can grep, version control, diff, jump with Vim key bindings, etc.

The layout engines are very hard. We've been making https://terrastruct.com/tala for over 2 years now. At first it seemed dubious whether it was even possible to beat Graphviz, but we've been designing it to emulate how diagrams might look on a whiteboard drawn by humans. That's a very different heuristic than the theoretical hierarchical cross-minimizations that previous algorithms strive for, and it's yielded good results for a subset of diagrams.

https://github.com/terrastruct/TALA

(apologies for this path. trying to strike the balance of making it findable for those who search for it while hidden to those who just want free.)

You're right, d2-docs will be changed to render all diagrams with Dagre or ELK instead.

The docs existed before D2 was open source and we had open source layout options. Sorry about that.

https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43

> By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either

Not sure what you mean no compilable examples. Full source of the docs is at https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs including all the examples. The first example in the Github repo also had a line "Rendered with the TALA layout engine" so the source was upfront.

> Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy.

We're running a company, we're absolutely interested in making money.

But open sourcing D2 doesn't just help us with user acquisition, it certainly also helps the community in adding another open source alternative in the text to diagram market. And it's good quality code. If we go under, someone else can pickup the torch and fork D2.

And it's incorrect to say that the free engines are not as good. They absolutely are suitable alternatives and do beat TALA in many instances. It's not in our interest to hide the best parts of D2, or else no one would use it. I'd even go as far to say TALA will never be as good as them in many instances, especially when the structure is hierarchical. But that's ok, they all use different algorithms and that's what makes them good in different instances. TALA is specifically for software diagrams, in instances such as if you have many nested containers.

If you can quote a specific piece of text on our GitHub or website, we will change it to make it more clear that D2 is fully open source and TALA is just an optional optimization.