[rowanG077]

Well not having chromium as a dependency is a start. But even glossing over that fact I found that it's much better for many diagrams. PlantUML is also a one stop shop. You can basically make anything kind of diagram in it.

[anticodon]

> Well not having chromium as a dependency is a start.

Java as a dependency is not much better. It's also huge which is important if you build your diagrams in containers and/or CI/CD. It's also very slow to start. I'm always surprised when benchmarks show that Java is "fast", because it's so huge and has atrocious cold start time, that makes it very unpleasant to use for CLI utilities.

[zokier]

If you are super concerned about startup times, you could run plantuml as web service instead, then your renders are just a single http call away

https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml-server

[rowanG077]

The big difference here is that chromium is an end user application. Java is designed to be a dependency. In fact java only goal in life is as a dependency.