[holtwick]

I would like to refine my answer regarding the rapidly growing log. If we assume that we have a real-time application, then every keystroke or pointer action can indeed create a change entry.

But this storage format is designed for "long term" and "slow" operations. Where "slow" means in the time lapse of a second instead of a milisecond. This allows us to combine multiple changes into a single log entry.

CRDT implementations like Yjs are good at concentrating such changes into smaller chunks of data. For example, writing text in a rich text editor like Prosemirror is then reduced to something like a string and a position.

But the UI can also be lazy and throttle things. A string input field can only fire changes when the field is left or not typed for a second or so.

These steps will significantly reduce the size of the log. They did in my implementations.

But this is not the end of realtime for such applications. These applications could still pass changes directly over P2P, as long as the log remains consistent, so that the resulting document will always eventually consistent.