> “Distributed state is so fundamentally complex that I think we actually need CRDTs (or something like them) to reason about it effectively.”
Gamedevs working on multiplayer FPSs and MMOs (which requires resolving incredibly complex state synchronizations at millisecond-scales) have done this for decades, and they haven’t been using any fancy CRDTs. Maybe they might have some ideas on how to achieve fast document synchronization as well?
If you forget about P2P and only think about server/client type connections (since P2P doesn’t give you that much advantages in a Google-Docs type service), I think there’s a lot of overlap between multiplayer games and collaborative document editing, and maybe some cross-domain pollination might be needed to solve this problem.
Gamedevs working on multiplayer FPSs and MMOs (which requires resolving incredibly complex state synchronizations at millisecond-scales) have done this for decades, and they haven’t been using any fancy CRDTs. Maybe they might have some ideas on how to achieve fast document synchronization as well?
If you forget about P2P and only think about server/client type connections (since P2P doesn’t give you that much advantages in a Google-Docs type service), I think there’s a lot of overlap between multiplayer games and collaborative document editing, and maybe some cross-domain pollination might be needed to solve this problem.