Comment by josephg

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.)