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Show HN: Mmdr – 1000x faster Mermaid rendering in pure Rust (no browser) (github.com)

47 points by jeremyh1 ↗ HN
I was building a Rust-based agentic coding TUI and needed to render Mermaid diagrams. Noticed the official mermaid-cli spawns a full browser instance (Puppeteer/Chrome) just to render diagrams. Decided to fix this.

mmdr is a native Rust renderer. No browser, no Node.js.

  mermaid-cli:  ~3000ms per diagram
  mmdr:         ~3ms per diagram
Supports 13 diagram types: flowchart, sequence, class, state, ER, pie, gantt, timeline, journey, mindmap, git graph, XY chart, and quadrant.

4 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread
jackothy
Does it make sense to create a Wasm build of this for the browser? Or is the speedup mainly due to the browser spawning step rather than execution/rendering itself?
plankalkyl
Could this be used as a drop-in replacement for mermaid-cli or is the CLI different?
tricked
This is really neat, i wonder if this could be made into a typst plugin now so that you can create mermaid code blocks that turn into diagrams when rendered. The original mermaid can't be added to typst sadly but i bet this could.