Mmdr
1000x faster Mermaid rendering in pure Rust (no browser)
Details
- External ID
- 46885868
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Mmdr
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 47
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.807277628032345
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- graphics rendering and visual tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- fast mermaid rendering in rust
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a pure native Rust renderer that parses Mermaid syntax, performs layout calculations, and rasterizes graphics without a browser engine is a complex graphics engineering endeavor.
What it would actually take: This project requires writing or integrating a complete Mermaid syntax parser, implementing complex graph layout algorithms (such as Sugiyama-style hierarchical graph layout or force-directed algorithms), and a font metrics/rendering pipeline without browser dependencies. It then needs a vector/raster 2D rendering backend (like resvg, skia, or piet) to output SVGs or images accurately. This demands specialized knowledge in graph theory, geometry, and low-level computer graphics.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: mermaid-cli, mermaid (original JavaScript version), md2cb
Concerns raised: Whether it's a drop-in replacement for mermaid-cli, Speedup mainly from browser spawning vs actual execution, WASM version performance comparison to browser implementation
Feature requests: Typst plugin support for mermaid diagrams, WASM build for browser usage
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 77 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #26 of 78 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 93 days after the earliest competitor.
- Line9 · hn · 2026-08-06 · 87 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Ferrite · hn · 2026-01-11 · 241 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- Visimer · hn · 2026-08-17 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Vloam Mermaid · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- FlowPeek · ph · 2026-09-11 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- nice-mermaid.nvim · github · 2026-09-20 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Graph2agent; Mermaid diagrams, explained for agents · hn · 2026-08-10 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- SwiftDependencyGraphExplorer · github · 2026-09-10 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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