Excellent article! As someone who has to work with collaborative editing I must say the complexity of the whole area is at times daunting to say the least. So many edge-cases. So many mines to step on.
Now I think I am convinced that the OT vs CRDT performance comparison is kind of moot point and the question is more about the user experience. Which version produces nicer results when two very diverged documents are merged. Maybe one of these days I'll read an article about that too.
To get off on a tangent a little bit, I'd be interested to know how one could add in tracking of changes to Diamond or other CRDT? Can you add an arbitrary payload to the operation and then just materialize the areas different from the original snapshot? I know Yjs can do this by creating snapshots and then comparing them to another snapshot but it seemed a bit awkward and not suited for real-time editing.
> Which version produces nicer results when two very diverged documents are merged.
From the user’s perspective merging behaviour is basically identical in all of these systems.
Diamond supports full per character change tracking. So you know who authored what. I think Yjs does this too. I’m not sure what you mean about materialising areas differently? I’d like to have full branch support in diamond at some point too, so you can work in a branch, switch branches, merge branches, and all of that.
From the user’s perspective merging behaviour is basically identical in all of these systems.
Ah, ok. Neat.
I’m not sure what you mean about materialising areas differently?
I meant finding the ranges of the document that have been changed relative to snapshot x and showing them based on the user id who changed them. If that can be done in real-time as the changes come in that would be really impressive.
Ah. Yeah that’s doable. Diamond stores the client ID which authored each character in the document and I have a method for finding out which changes exist in one version but not in another. That would be doable
Now I think I am convinced that the OT vs CRDT performance comparison is kind of moot point and the question is more about the user experience. Which version produces nicer results when two very diverged documents are merged. Maybe one of these days I'll read an article about that too.
To get off on a tangent a little bit, I'd be interested to know how one could add in tracking of changes to Diamond or other CRDT? Can you add an arbitrary payload to the operation and then just materialize the areas different from the original snapshot? I know Yjs can do this by creating snapshots and then comparing them to another snapshot but it seemed a bit awkward and not suited for real-time editing.