KEkevinjahns·Aug 18, 2020
> I have a strong sense of despair seeing how much time I’ve wasted investing in approaches which won’t feature strongly in the future.
Your comment makes me sad on several levels..
Firstly, ShareJS and OT types was the first open framework to build collaborative applications on the web. Your work inspired me to work on shared editing - I just wanted it to work over WebRTC.
Until 2015, JavaScript engines implemented different garbage collection approaches that wouldn't allow efficient CRDT implementations (as they need to handle millions of objects).
The idea of distributed applications on the web just popped up a couple of years ago. WebRTC didn't even exist when you started ShareJS. Even Websockets were still a bit experimental. OT was the right technology at the time.
Lastly, I'd love for you to try out Yjs. The current JavaScript impl
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ementation handles 2.5 million operations / second. A Rust/C implementation would surely handle more than that as it is not limited by automatic garbage collection.
You can compare Automerge's current performance branch with Yjs' current implementation in [1]. To be fair, their implementation is not finished. If I understood correctly, they want to load the compressed format directly into memory. I played with this idea a few years ago and represented the Yjs model in an ArrayBuffer. This approach will improve load-time, but the performance will be intolerable in other aspects (e.g. when applying document updates, transforming the document to a String/JSON, or when computing diffs). The performance of Yjs is the result of more than five years research. I still have a couple of ideas to improve performance significantly. Although, my article clearly shows that it is definitely good enough now.
[1]: https://github.com/dmonad/crdt-benchmarks/pull/4