[ekzhang]

Thanks! Operational transformation is the same technology that powers Google Docs. It's been studied in academia for real-time collaboration since the 1990s and has eventual consistency guarantees. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

The Rust operational-transform library was not written by me, but it's listed on crates.io by spebern, and it's worked wonderfully so far. It seems to be a very close port of ot.js (https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js). The text transformation algorithm isn't very complicated (<700 SLOC including tests), but there's probably room for optimization!

[zingplex]

Congratulations on shipping, what you have is very slick.

Quick question, not trying to start a flame war just genuinely curious. Why did you pick OT over other approaches to realtime collaborative editing such as CRDTs?

[josephg]

I'm not the author but I've written a lot of OT code. OT works great when you have a centralised server. Its fast and simple. I (and others) are working on it but there aren't many production quality, fast CRDT implementations in rust and other languages yet.

[ekzhang]

I'm also curious about CRDTs, but after making this project, I agree that OT seems to "just work" performance-wise and are super simple.