Comment by crawshaw
5 years ago
I have been consistently at odds with myself comparing CRDTs vs. OT. One the one hand, CRDTs have a nicer core formalism. On the other hand, OT works, and is closer to the actual driving events of text editing.
The core argument of this article: that CRDTs now work and distributed is better than centralized I question. I certainly want more distribution than "everything is run on a google server" but do I really foresee a need for distributing a single document? One server with an optimal OT implementation can probably handle near a million active connections.
In practice, that's plenty. Each piece of data having one owner is quite reasonable. There are lots of pieces of data.
I remain on the fence for collaborative text editing. Though it's great to see all the work pushing CRDTs forward!
Blog author here. I've been having this conversation with a lot of folks over the last few weeks and I hear you.
Does it make sense for us as an opensource community to invest our time and energy making one really good CRDT (with implementations in a few languages). Or does it make sense for us to distribute that energy between a bunch of CRDT and OT implementations, with different performance tradeoffs?
My take is that its been hugely beneficial to us all that JSON is a standard, because I can use it from every language, and have confidence that the implementations are fast and good quality. I think we have an opportunity to make that for a good CRDT too. Even if OT would work fine in your architecture, if we have a great, capable, fast CRDT kicking around, it could be a reasonable default for most people. And my claim is that the performance difference between CRDTs and OT is smaller than the difference between high and low quality implementations. (I expect a well written CRDT in wasm will outperform my OT code in javascript.)