Comment by WorldMaker

I feel like the state-of-the-art here is slowly starting to change. I think CRDTs for too many years got too caught up in "conflict-free" as a "manifest destiny" sort of thing more than "hope and prayer" and thought they'd keep finding the right fixed merged algorithm for every situation. I started watching CRDTs from the perspective of source control and having a strong inkling that "data is always messy" and "conflicts are human" (conflicts are kind of inevitable in any structure trying to encode data made by people).

I've been thinking for a bit that it is probably about time the industry renamed that first C to something other than "conflict-free". There is no freedom from conflicts. There's conflict resistance, sure and CRDTs can provide in their various data structures a lot of conflict resistance. But at the end of the day if the data structure is meant to encode an application for humans, it needs every merge tool and review tool and audit tool it can offer to deal with those.

I think we're finally starting to see some of the light in the tunnel in the major CRDT efforts and we're finally leaving the detour of "no it must be conflict-free, we named it that so it must be true". I don't think any one library is yet delivering it at a good high level, but I have that feeling that "one of the next libraries" is maybe going to start getting the ergonomics of conflict handling right.