Comment by benrbray

CRDTs seem very promising, but we still have a long way to go. The most exciting work in this area is being done by Ink&Switch [0]. They have a number of interesting real-world app prototypes based on CRDTs.

- An interesting case where CRDTs failed is Xi-editor, where they tried to use CRDTs as the basis for a plugin system [1,2].

- One of the biggest problems with CRDTs is the overhead needed to keep track of the full document history. The automerge [3] project has been working on efficient compression of CRDTs for JSON datatypes.

- The idea of monotonic updates is really appealing at first, but I was disappointed when I realized there's no good solution to handle deletions. Tombstones, to me, seem like kind of a hack, albeit a necessary one. Practically, CRDTs aren't the silver bullet they might seem like at first.

- Another lesson learned is that when ten people are editing the same paragraph, there's not really a right answer. I think the key to implementing CRDTs is doing it at the correct level of granularity.

- ProseMirror intentionally chose NOT to use CRDTs [4].

- Some more good references are [5,6,7]

[0] https://abishov.com/xi-editor/docs/crdt-details.html