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CRDTs go brrr

Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement realtime collaborative editing (like Google Docs). They implemented lots of algorithms - CRDTs and OT algorithms and stuff. And they benchmarked them all to see how they perform. (Cool!!) Some algorithms wo...

Click to view the original at josephg.com

Hasnain says:

Really good read on performance optimizations, and some cool data structure work on CRDTs

“A decade ago Google Wave really needed a good quality list CRDT. I got super excited when the papers for CRDTs started to emerge. LOGOOT and WOOT seemed like a big deal! But that excitement died when I realised the algorithms were too slow and inefficient to be practically useful. And I made a big mistake - I assumed if the academics couldn't make them fast, nobody could.

But sometimes the best work comes out of a collaboration between people with different skills. I'm terrible at academic papers, I'm pretty good at making code run fast. And yet here, in my own field, I didn't even try to help. The researchers were doing their part to make P2P collaborative editing work. And I just thumbed my nose at them all and kept working on Operational Transform. If I helped out, maybe we would have had fast, workable CRDTs for text editing a decade ago. Oops! It turned out collaborative editing needed a collaboration between all of us. How ironic! Who could have guessed?!

Posted on 2021-08-01T07:06:42+0000