Simon Willison’s Weblog

28th September 2020 - Link Blog

I was wrong. CRDTs are the future (via) Joseph Gentle has been working on collaborative editors since being a developer on Google Wave back in 2010, later building ShareJS. He’s used Operational Transforms throughout, due to their performance and memory benefits over CRDTs (Conflict-free replicated data types)—but the latest work in that space from Martin Kleppmann and other researchers has seen him finally switch allegiance to these newer algorithms. As a long-time fan of collaborative editing (ever since the Hydra/SubEthaEdit days) I thoroughly enjoyed this as an update on how things have evolved over the past decade.