The other downside is that D2 is a thinly-veiled Open Core project and you'll be forever stuck with yet another company trying to get money from you:

https://d2lang.com/tour/tala/

> Proprietary layout engine developed by Terrastruct

> TALA is a separate install from D2, to keep a clean cut between 100% free and open-source D2, and proprietary, closed-source TALA.

The two non-proprietary layout engines are 1) Dagre, a port of ideas from Graphviz to Javascript, where the only benefit over Graphviz seems to be "it's in Javascript!" 2) ELK, a fairly naive layout engine that makes non-symmetrical graphs with oddly crooked lines.

It's weird to me that TALA is considered the "special sauce" layout engine, because I've only ever had it produce extremely weird layouts for me.

I always tend to end up using ELK.

They were working on a wasm version some time ago I believe [0]. Not sure how usable this is insofar, but it may be of interest.

[0]: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/pull/436/files

https://play.d2lang.com/ loads https://play.d2lang.com/d2.wasm so presumably "all done"

I have the impression this is still using api.d2lang.com/render/svg as the primary source for its renders. So to me it seems that - although wasm is being loaded/used - this is maybe more for client-side processing steps, rather than the full rendering being done in wasm.

That’s a pretty major downside, since broad in-browser support (GitHub, Notion etc) is arguably Mermaid‘s USP.

It's not too bad if you're prepared to set up a rendering pipeline using a static site generator like mkdocs. This will get you much better results than just letting GitHub et al render markdown in whatever style they please.

We're quite happy with mermaid though, not sure what's the issue with it?

Well it just can't do as much as many other tools.