mermaid-cli VS dmd

you can use mermaid-cli to create pngs/svgs

I come from past experiments with (py)graphviz, yed, probably a couple other forgotten things. (As well as manual diagrams in LucidChart and even Inkscape.) And am generally a non-web python guy.

I was looking at Mermaid last weekend, since a coworker has praised it a few times and I was wanting to play with it.

I think my expectation of how to use it was wrong? I typically expect to share my diagrams as .png files. The main documentation didn't seem to give much guidance in this usecase.

I ended up going to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli ... there didn't seem to be a simple install-and-use pathway similar to `apt` or `pip`, so I ended up trying the docker image for it. I got it working to create pngs, but I thought having to mess with docker volume mounts and defining my own aliases (`alias mermaid='docker run -u $UID -it --rm -v ~/mermaid:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i'` so I can do `mermaid blah.mmd` in my ~/mermaid folder) was a bit cumbersome...

Just sharing to see if there's hot takes on where I went wrong, I guess. (for example, I certainly didn't extensively read the docs to understand the usage paradigm it's intended for)

node cli tool if java isn’t your thing. https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Here's the pipeline spitting out the same error as on my macbook did.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/actions/runs/8023469412/job/219...

Not completely on topic (if you read TFA) but my favorite Git commit is by compiler badass and HN frequenter, where he checks in an entire C compiler to the D language repo:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584

A new generated code alone is 4000 lines long [1]. The actual code added is just 2000 lines, and some are used to pay debts, I mean, to make a proper code generator (which can be alternatively written in a simpler scripting langauge). In any case it is never comparable to the entier C parser proper.

[1] https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15307/files#diff-3677bcc89...

D is completely opensource already (https://github.com/dlang/dmd). The "open" of OpenD is just ADR saying that OpenD will be more open to new language features than D has historically been.

The reference compiler, DMD, is open source: https://github.com/dlang/dmd

But they don't accept just any Pull Request or features the community submits, understandably. There's a process called DIP for language improvements: https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/README.md

However, by some accounts, it's really hard to get anything through.

Given D already has so many feature, I find that to be a good thing , to be honest, by not everyone agrees, of course.