Discussion
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) provide a decentralized & highly-flexible means of collaborative-editing! Allowing you to merge your changes as frequently or infrequently as you like, with any conflicts automatically handled. As long as they're encoded using CRDTs.
I'll use it in my Alonzo visual-functional programming language, because I need guarantees that Git doesn't provide.
They represent your doc as an inversely-linked tree of tiny edits, with metadata on whom & when.
1/3?
The key is to ensure that it doesn't matter in which order these edits arrive, you'll always get the same document out in the end. Hence that "C" originally stood for the maths concept of "Commutative".
However if we have each peer track its knowledge of the latest time it has seen from each of its peers (a "vector clock") we can combine that with the author's ID to break ties. Thus letting us consistently handle any edit!
We can use the latest edit we've seen from a peer as their clock.
2/3?
The other challenge with CRDTs is that all the additional metadata can, if we're not careful, take up a lot of additional storage-space. However if we arrange the data into columns & compress each column specially, we can compress that additional metadata away to next to nothing!
Or more practically there's the issue that dealing with live CRDTs requires a level of discipline that older code doesn't necessarily have.
3/3 Fin for today!
P.S. I've just found https://github.com/pkulchenko/syncX .
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