Most vector tools export to SVG, and you can use SVGO[1] to clean it up and optimize it.

1: https://github.com/svg/svgo

SVGO is interesting. One of my biggest complaints over the years has been that most tools that export to SVG do it in such a way that the file is so difficult to understand and edit that the results are useless.

Use https://inkscape.org/

Adobe Illustrator exports to SVG.

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/how-to/export-svg.html

And how good is it? Does anyone knows examples/has done some serious work in it?

I do frontend web dev in a big, mixed-media advertising agency. The logo's that we design for clients are created in Illustrator so they can scale to billboards or banner ads. The psd's that I receive for websites often contain icons done in illustrator. Exporting to svg is easy to do but yields code that is messy in the way that exporting a Word document to html is. It works but I'm not going to edit the code.

For what it is worth, Illustrator CC got an update on one of the .x versions (17.2?) that brought "Export SVG to Web" option that produces web quality SVGs (maybe SVGO exported even?), a huge improvement over the old Save As SVG route.

I routinely use Illustrator for fairly complex SVGs that are subsequently included in web pages, and the code is pretty serviceable. SVGO will clean it up a lot, but usually to the point of make it much hard to hand-tune.

dealing with `id="Layer1"` is annoying, but trivial. The endless nested `<g>` elements can be deleted. I've heard it's gotten better (I've neglected to ask for an update from CS6 for the past 2 years.

What is absolutely terrible is dealing with SVGs exported from Sketch. And that's all our UX/UI/Designers use these days.

For what it's worth the SVGs exported by Sketch are workable. I usually go in by hand and clean up the exports, but it's nowhere near as bad as old dreamweaver html exports.

I've had the opposite experience. Exports from sketch have the potential to be way off the canvas. This page has helped quite a bit: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/exploring-ways-to-expo...

In my experience the exported SVGs from Illustrator can be pretty noisey.

Inkscape is a good vector editor and works with SVG.

unless you're on a mac, where it's too slow and buggy for any "real work".

Mac is too slow in general for any CPU / RAM intensive work. Use Linux with better hardware in such case.

It's less of an issue for visualisations, as if a designer creates a mock-up, it's only used as a guide for implementation by a programmer, rather than an actual asset.

However we have used Sketch's SVG export for things like icons, and I've found it to be pretty good. There's even an CLI export tool than you can integrate into your build process.

I think artists and prgrammers ahve more in common than you think, so does pg . . . he even wrote a book about it—

Hackers and Painters: http://paulgraham.com/hp.html