To be more accurate, the comparison is not with Graphviz, but with dot(1).

Graphviz is a visualization framework and it includes many layout engines, implementing different algorithms: dot, neato, fdp, sfdp, circo, twopi, ...

It would be great if this new custom algorithm were to be contributed to Graphviz.

This is a cool example of how specializing a generic algorithm to a specific subspace can yield much better results. This is quite often the case in my experience, but we often don't bother utilizing properties that are specific to our problem space, and just apply the generic algorithm out of convenience (and because it is often good enough)

I would love to see this evolve into a more general purpose control flow graph viewer - pretty much any language implementation would find it a great debugging tool. it's probably most of the way there already.

This is a great write up.

I wonder if any of these techniques turn up in whatever the magic sauce is in D2’s TALA layout engine, which is in a league of its own IMO.

https://d2lang.com/examples/tala/

Nice work! The examples look better than the Graphviz output, indeed. This is a good example of how you can always beat a long-developed, generic tool by specializing for a much narrower use case.

This is a concept I'm working around with Microdiagram (microdiagram.com) prototype.

i.e. having a general purpose diagram/graph layout is hellishly difficult, but most of the diagrams/charts follow much simpler rules, thus it's much easier to have N languages, each for 1 type of diagram, than 1 language for N types of diagrams.

We looked at using Graphviz, but the copyleft nature of Graphviz license (Eclipse Public License) means that this will never be allowed in our company's software.

anyone working on this space easily gets a +1!

I have struggled with code to diagram tools for a while [mermaid and graphviz], and usually return to figjam when I need the readabilty and aesthetics.

graph-viz is MASSIVE and a binary. mermaid requires the browser's svg rendering system to work. I just need something that builds diagrams from description easily ...

Wow, thank you very much. I like the graphviz dot language. I may translate this to Rust.

This is great. I've been trying to generate diagrams for HDL hierarchies and neither Graphviz nor ELK can do a remotely good job. In fact I've never got good results from Graphviz for any graphs over a handful of nodes. I think it just isn't actually very good. But it has such huge mindshare even if there was a better option I wouldn't be able to find it.