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by gun_throwaway 2257 days ago
> How does OrbitDB compare to GUN?

I went to a meetup where the creator of GUN gave a presentation. To this day, it was the single strangest presentation I've ever experienced.

The presentation had numerous obvious errors. The audience kept pointing out major misunderstandings and errors about distributed systems. I remember one awkward moment where someone pointed out a glaring error in the author's model of conflict resolution that undermined one of his key points, which the GUN creator tried to gloss over as quickly as possible. To top it off, he ran out of slides before he finished his talk because he hadn't bothered to complete his whole slide deck before presenting. Instead, he just tried to improvise the last 1/3 of his talk about GUN.

It was so bad that we all walked out of there wondering if we had just been trolled. To this day, I'm still surprised when I read about GUN on Hacker News.

You don't need to take my word for it. I encourage anyone considering GUN to open up the source code and look through some random files: https://github.com/amark/gun/tree/master/src
2 comments
olah_1 2252 days ago
It's humorous to me that Hacker News allows this kind of unsubstantiated slander. No example of "obvious errors", no mention of which talk this even was.

I'm not even a Gun fanboy. I've just used it successfully and it has done for me what it claims to do.

Could it be that Hacker News has a vested interest in seeing competitors to IPFS fail? I'm not sure, but either way, your comment grosses me out.

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sagichmal 2257 days ago
I wasn't at this specific presentation, but I've seen other presentations by the author, and had basically the same takeaway. Snake oil.
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tecleandor 2257 days ago
What are the alternatives for offline-first databases? I have a project in the back of my head where clients to a simple central database would be frequently offline and I had GUN in my notes for doing that.
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olah_1 2252 days ago
I'd say another option might be PouchDB in combination with CouchDB. That's what Hoodie uses.

But I don't see why you couldn't try GUN if you wanted to. It's disturbing how HN seems to demand a kind of "brand loyalty" regarding technology. Just use what works.

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