D2 Is Non-Profit (d2lang.com)

61 pointsby alixanderwang3 days ago23 comments

dacort 2 days ago

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.

aninteger 2 days ago

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.

keyle 2 days ago

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

Nail2680 2 days ago

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

sourweasel 2 days ago

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.

Nail2680 2 days ago

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.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago

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

wps 2 days ago

> 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!

margalabargala 2 days ago

This is going to be really interesting.

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

_def 2 days ago

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

derpyzza 2 days ago

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.

alixanderwang 2 days ago

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!

triyambakam 2 days ago

> 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.

sea-gold 3 days ago

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

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

alixanderwang 2 days ago

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

dacort 2 days ago

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

sea-gold a day ago

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

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 days ago

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).

IshKebab a day ago

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

aitchnyu 2 days ago

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

morningsam a day ago

>do LLMs generate D2 code as easily as Mermaid

Yes

>and do tools like Github and Confluence render them?

nf-x 2 days ago

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

0x696C6961 2 days ago

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