1. awesome ~ this seems to be in a sweet spot! (yes, mermaid is fine; but often looks bad - esp when visualizing large diagrams)
2. it would be great to have this as a layouting layer for C4
3. which brings me to a suggestion: i think it would make sense to allow for decoupling the topological parts of the language (arrows, groupings, etc) from the layouting concerns (left of, right of, etc)
Super interesting. So, you'd have something like "use architecture.dsl" (to "load" the C4 model definitions), and then begin to specify layout?
Yes this would be one way. But maybe a suite of plungins that allows other renerers to consume .rel files might make for a better ecosystem.
To explain the use case: One advantage would be: maintain model (and views) in C4, provide layout on top.
We recently generated a big C4 model of the whole company. Good and informative since you can click through it! But it doesn't look nice and doesn't tell a coherent picture visually.