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by infinitebit 9 days ago
I was about to ask where you work that you’re implementing new CRDTs and then I noticed your username! Thanks for all that you do!

I work on the live collab at my company, and using AI while coding has into recently sort of “clicked” for me. We use an (I’m pretty sure) unheard of algorithm for collaborative editing, and I’ve had a long term goal of turning it into an implementation of EG Walker, but our document model is very complex and most out of the box CRDTs don’t quite fit. Maybe Fable will be what gets me over the hump.
2 comments
aquariusDue 8 days ago
Long shot here because I'm not knowledgeable enough about CRDTs but maybe something like DSON would help? I saw a talk about it a while ago and it might be useful.

https://blog.helsing.ai/posts/dson-a-delta-state-crdt-for-re...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QkLD7JhD_I&pp=ygUJZHNvbiBjc...

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infinitebit 8 days ago
Ty, checking this out!
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josephg 9 days ago
I’d be fascinated to hear more if you’re willing to share. What is special about your document model which makes existing tools like automerge a bad fit?
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infinitebit 8 days ago
We have cross-field invariants that merging at the data structure level can't ensure (in an obvious way, at least), and "lose the semantic meaning of a conflict". The main idea behind their approach is that certain parts of the model can have custom "mergers" that are able to run business logic to maintain these invariants.

Worth noting, the decision to eschew CRDTs predates my time here, and I've pushed for a CRDT rewrite quite a bit since I believe it could be done. The other main concern they had was memory usage, but it seems like EG Walker would solve that. Our system uses a "Commit DAG", (an Event DAG by another name), and does a three-way merge using a common ancestor of the diverged documents, and so a lot of the bones of EG Walker are there, and I'm exploring ways in which we could gradually move to it.

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