Comment by kevinjahns
5 years ago
What are you missing from Yjs?
I'm sharing the vision with you that things should just work. It literally takes you two lines of code to make any of the supported editors collaborative. The Yjs types are a minimal abstraction over the crdt model. I hope that other people build more abstractions around Yjs (for example a react store that simply syncs).
The thing is.. all of what you are talking about is already possible. A wasm port will eventually bring some performance improvements. But Yjs is already very close to optimal performance and it works in all browsers.
But I really am interested in more feature request. I'm mainly interested in building collaborative apps with CRDTs. CRDTs as a data model is an entirely new concept and we need to get experience on how to build apps with CRDTs. And also we need to find out what is still missing.
So head over to discuss.yjs.dev and share your experience.
I want yjs to have:
- Support for moving objects (as well as inserting and deleting)
- Better support for long lived documents. (I want to be able to pull historical deleted stuff out of a document so it doesn't grow unbounded).
- Presence information and markers (this is sort of supported now?)
- The gorgeous automerge API frontend ported across
- Support for interacting with yjs from rust / C / swift / etc
- The gorgeous automerge API frontend ported across
I want all of that too. Although I would add Automerge's API on-top of Yjs as an additional layer. It really does play nicely with Web Frameworks like react. Although for building editor bindings I would choose the Yjs types because they allow faster access to the data. Yjs only provides a minimal abstraction around the CRDT. I hope that other people will build nice stores/abstractions around Yjs that make interacting with shared data easier.
- Presence information and markers (this is sort of supported now?)
Presence is handled by a different CRDT (the Awareness object in y-protocols). All providers implement the Awareness protocol. In many cases you want one awareness instance for several documents, so it makes sense to separate them.
Markers is probably what I refer to as relative positions: references to specific positions in the document. It even plays nicely with undo-redo.
- Better support for long lived documents. (I want to be able to pull historical deleted stuff out of a document so it doesn't grow unbounded).
Yjs does this reasonably well. To a point that you can even build 3d applications like relm.us with Yjs. But you are right that more work could be invested in researching even better solutions.
- Support for moving objects (as well as inserting and deleting)
Moving of elements can already be modeled with Yjs [1]. Although the approaches described are not very convenient to use. Automerge implements this feature natively, but I'm a bit hesitant to implement the next best approach because I see many downsides that conflicts with features I plan to implement. There is a discussion thread where I outline a few of the tradeoffs [1].
[1]: https://discuss.yjs.dev/t/moving-elements-in-lists/92