Interesting. Of course, generating diagrams from text isn't new. This especially reminds me of DOT as implemented by Graphviz and others, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag... ; DOT is widely supported.

There are others too, including:

* Graph Modeling Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_Modelling_Language * PGF/TikZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGF/TikZ * pic (for troff)

If someone has used both Mermaid & an alternative I'd be curious to hear a detailed compare & contrast.