CRDTs are the future

I'm part of the team that makes Zoho Writer (a Google Docs alternative) - https://writer.zoho.com We went with OT for our real-time syncing of edits in 2010 and a decade later, we are still sticking with OT for reasons I already stated sometime back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186883 However, in the spirit of "There are no solutions, only trade-offs" CRDTs are absolutely necessary for certain type of syncing - like syncing a set of database nodes. But for systems which already mandate…

Hi everyone! Author here. I'm happy to answer questions. I wrote this a couple years ago. Since then I've been working on my own CRDT called Diamond Types[1], which uses a lot of these ideas to be bonkers fast. I've built several OT based collaborative editing systems, and diamond types is much faster than any of them - though rust and wasm might be the real MVPs here. I wrote a follow-up to this article last year when I got…

This is going to be a naive and stupid question perhaps... but here it goes. What optimization are we chasing here that's worth all this effort and brain power that will be so amazing in 10 years? I've been using real-time collaborative editing tools for the past decade and it's "good enough". We.. collaborate... and then we go about our day.. almost zero friction 99.9% of the time. This just doesn't really feel like a real problem to me. A…

Discussed before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24617542#24621238 as mentioned in the article.