cocalc VS kroki

Coincidentally, I'm in the middle [1] of building something for https://CoCalc.com that is exactly what you're describing. For collaborative document editing (e.g., google drive and overleaf) it's a common feature, but for code editors it isn't. CoCalc is both. Anyway, nothing to see yet, but you might want to check with us in a month...

[1] https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/pull/8071

- CoCalc (which I wrote) can be self-hosted but is NOT FOSS, though you can browse the code here: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc -- do a quick "self hosted" test if you want by typing "docker run --name=cocalc-trial -d -p 4043:443 sagemathinc/cocalc-trial"

- Google Colab is fully closed source and I think there is no self hosted option.

- Deepnote is fully closed source and I think has no self hosted option.

- Saturn Cloud enterprise is a self hosted option for Saturn Cloud. Saturn Cloud is I think a nice management layer around open source JupyterLab.

- I think Apache Zeppelin is self-hostable FOSS.

I have some unit tests for billing and subscription code for my company that started breaking in CI today due to the leap day: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/commit/8575029c2b76787...

1. I'm integrating ChatGPT extensively into https://CoCalc.com. This integration makes a lot of sense, because cocalc is a platform in which relatively inexperienced students use Jupyter notebooks, linux terminals and Latex. So far, the most popular feature by far is a "Help me fix this" button that appears above stacktraces in Jupyter notebooks.

2. One software engineering challenges is that ChatGPT often outputs code in markdown blocks. I've had to emphasize in prompts that it should explicitly mark the language. I then got inspired to make it possible to evaluate in place the code that appears in these blocks using a Jupyter kernel, and spent a week making that work (so, e.g., if you type a question into the chatgpt box on the landing page at https://cocalc.com, and code appears in the output, often you can just evaluate it right there). There seem to be endless surprises and challenges though. For example, a few minutes ago I realized that sometimes the giant tracebacks one gets when using Python in Jupyter notebooks are so big (even doing simple things with matplotlib) that they end up resulting in too much truncation: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/issues/6634

3. I'm mostly using GPT-3.5-turbo rather than GPT4, even though I have a GPT4 api key. Aside from costs, GPT4 takes about 4x as long, which often just feels too long for my use case. The average time for a complete response from GPT-3.5 for my application is about 8 seconds, versus over 30s for GPT4.

Github's implementation is really lazy. There are many much better approaches to precisely this problem. E.g., Jupyter notebooks implement one that has matured in the wild over a decade. There's this very flexible markdown-it plugin that implements anther https://github.com/goessner/markdown-it-texmath, and my version of it here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/blob/master/src/packag... which I rewrote in typescript with a focus on the same semantics as Jupyter has, but for CoCalc, and I've been working on using unifiedjs to provide more general latex for Markdown (not just formulas) here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/pull/5982 Parsing math is much easier if you use a plugin to an existing markdown parser, rather than trying to do some hack outside of that (which is what Github probably does, and also what Jupyter does).

In this blog post, we will implement a custom section helper that allows to invoke a Kroki.io server to generate images from almost every possible diagram as code language.

KeenWrite parses the `diagram-` prefix then passes the word `graphviz` to Kroki (https://kroki.io/), which has an API for rendering a variety of ASCII diagrams, including Mermaid. Meaning, if Kroki adds a new diagram type, KeenWrite gets it for free (without modification).

In Markdown, formatting a source code snippet entails using the standard syntax for code blocks:

    ``` graphviz

Kroki [1] supports TikZ and by extension: PGF [2] and LaTeX. It supports SVG, PDF, JPEG, and PNG outputs. Rendering is done on the server. URLs can be quite long since the source is embedded in the URL but you can use a URL shortener [3].

[1]: https://kroki.io/

The L in DSL is "Language", so it's a programming language that is domain, or niche, specific. These are code.

Diagramming is a domain, and within diagramming are any number of diagram type domains, leading to concise languages for particular niches.

Compare 25+ of these niches here: https://kroki.io/

Your wish showing up in the face of a submission just 14 days ago and then another 29 days ago must be indicative of why there are so many dupes all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kroki.io

You can feel free to submit the GH repo, as that one doesn't seem to have been submitted before https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki

Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow is the other general purpose one and older than d2. It is "Source-Code License: 0-clause BSD" as it says on the page.

Someone made it into wasm and put playground for pikchr here https://www.jakethaw.com/pikchr_webassembly_demo/

Can also try pikchr online here on https://kroki.io/#try which is hosting many other text to diagram tools as well.

I use mermaid.js heavily, but plug for Kroki:

https://kroki.io/

“Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!”