[josephg]

You can just store a snapshot on disk (ie, the raw text) and load that directly. You only ever need to look at historical edits when merging concurrent changes into the local document state. (And thats pretty rare in practice).

Even when that happens, the algorithm only needs to look at operations as far back as the most recent "fork point" between the two branches in order to merge. (And we can compute that fork point in O(n) time - where n is the number of events that have happened since then). Its usually very very fast.

In an application like google docs or a wiki, the browser will usually never need to look at any historical changes at all in order to edit a document.

[vlovich123]

Very clever idea. Thanks for explaining