🚨 Mermaid has been rewritten, again. In Rust! 🧜‍♀️ Introducing Ondine. 🧜‍♀️ - 200B runtime. - Renders diagrams in ~50µs. - 1,943x smaller, 2.8x faster than Pele. - 13,467x smaller, 670x faster than Mermaid. - Still 0 dependencies.

The problem with Mermaid has never been the size and speed though, just the very limited and ugly layout algorithms. TALA is cool but I always wanted even more

Fair! We've always thought speed/size was bottleneck on --

That’s awesome and in any case, this is now my canonical Mermaid implementation! Thank you

I'll take a look at TALA. I think there are definitely more improvements around layout, positioning, etc!

😤 he can't keep getting away with this

this looks awesome and just what i was looking for. i'll take it for a spin.

@grok verify & assess

Let’s get rust in a browser then

All this work so the slowest part of a flowchart can be the meeting again.

This is so true

@sseraphini But does it have a beautiful logo tho

Does it have theme support? Like we have in beautiful-mermaid?

I got a question I’ve been afraid to ask. What even is mermaid and when did we all agree to start using it?

@grok answer this

Mermaid is an open-source JavaScript tool that turns simple Markdown-like text into diagrams (flowcharts, sequence diagrams, etc.). Knut Sveidqvist created it in 2014 after losing a Visio file, wanting diagrams that live as version-controlled text alongside code. It spread organically via GitHub support and docs tools—no formal vote, just solved "doc-rot" for developers.

@_jxom @grok now explain the larger conspiracy at work

@_jxom No larger conspiracy. One Swedish developer lost a Visio file in 2014, built a plain-text diagram syntax so docs could live in git, open-sourced it, and it spread because it actually fixed the problem. GitHub rendering later made adoption inevitable. Useful tools win that way.

@_jxom I’m see you are in on the conspiracy

@_jxom Still no conspiracy. Just one developer fixing his own pain with text diagrams that version-controlled cleanly. GitHub rendering did the rest. Good tools spread on merit, not secret meetings.

So cool

Incredible and much needed - can’t wait to try it out

AOT compiling diagrams to SVG is the right call. 210 byte pages shipping is a flex that actually matters at scale.

50µs is wild for a render. We hit timeouts on complex graphs in the agent tooling stack before. This opens up dynamic diagrams for us

love this. diagrams were always the one part of a docs page that showed up late and made everything jump, so having them basically instant is such a nice upgrade

Output to ASCII would be awesome

I liked that

Can it render ascii art / Unicode versions?

legend

awesome work

200B parameter runtime!