> Our principle of not losing input due to concurrent modifications appears reasonable, but as illustrated in Figure 4, it leads to merged document states that may be surprising to application programmers who are more familiar with sequential programs.
That decision is a bit odd to me. Not only do they show that their merge system can produce data that the application considers invalid, it can even convert a string to a list without having any operation creating a list explicitly.
> Moreover, garbage collection (tombstone removal) is required in order to prevent unbounded growth of the datastructure
That is always the painful part of a CRDT system. Until that part is done, it cannot really be used in production. That said, previous work on CRDTs give me confidence that it can be implemented with minimal overhead.
> In fact, we wrote the LATEX source text of this paper using an experimental collaborative text editor that is based on our implementation of this CRDT. We are making the character-by-character editing trace of this document available as supplemental data of this paper
String editing is brushed over in the paper. I'd love to see their implementation. Does anyone know where it all is?
That decision is a bit odd to me. Not only do they show that their merge system can produce data that the application considers invalid, it can even convert a string to a list without having any operation creating a list explicitly.
> Moreover, garbage collection (tombstone removal) is required in order to prevent unbounded growth of the datastructure
That is always the painful part of a CRDT system. Until that part is done, it cannot really be used in production. That said, previous work on CRDTs give me confidence that it can be implemented with minimal overhead.
> In fact, we wrote the LATEX source text of this paper using an experimental collaborative text editor that is based on our implementation of this CRDT. We are making the character-by-character editing trace of this document available as supplemental data of this paper
String editing is brushed over in the paper. I'd love to see their implementation. Does anyone know where it all is?