crdt-benchmarks VS automerge

Author of Yjs here. I'm all for faster data structures. But only benchmarking one dimension looks quite fishy to me. A CRDT needs to be adequate at multiple dimensions. At least you should describe the tradeoffs in your article.

The time to insert characters is the least interesting property of a CRDT. It doesn't matter to the user whether a character is inserted within .1ms or .000000001ms. No human can type that fast.

It would be much more interesting to benchmark the time it takes to load a document containing X operations. Yjs & Yrs are pretty performant and conservative on memory here because they don't have to build an index (it's a tradeoff that we took consciously).

When benchmarking it is important to measure the right things and interpret the results somehow so that you can give recommendations when to use your algorithm / implementation. Some things can't be fast/low enough (e.g. time to load a document, time to apply updates, memory consumption, ..) other things only need to be adequate (e.g. time to insert a character into a document).

Unfortunately, a lot of academic papers set a bad trend of only measuring one dimension. Yeah, it's really easy to succeed in one dimension (e.g. memory or insertion-time) and it is very nice click-bait. But that doesn't make your CRDT a viable option in practice.

I maintain a set of benchmarks that tests multiple dimensions [1]. I'd love to receive a PR from you.

[1]: https://github.com/dmonad/crdt-benchmarks

Diamond types author here! Congratulations on getting your crdt working! It’s lovely to see a new generation of CRDTs which have decent performance.

And nice stuff implementing peritext! I’d love to do the same in diamond types at some point. You beat me to it!

Im building a little repository of real world collaborative editing traces to use when benchmarking, comparing and optimising text based CRDTs[1]. The automerge-perf editing trace isn’t enough on its own. And we’re increasingly converging on a format for multi user concurrent editing traces too[2]. It’d be great to add some rich text editing traces in the mix if you’re interested in recording something, so we can also compare how peritext performs in different systems.

Anyway, welcome to the community! Love to have more implementations around!

https://github.com/josephg/crdt-benchmarks

https://github.com/dmonad/crdt-benchmarks/issues/20

So yes, a particularly large document is not the norm but it can happen.

JavaScript CRDTs can be quite performant, see the Yjs benchmarks: https://github.com/dmonad/crdt-benchmarks

I'm not aware of any usable CRDT implementations for Dart, my plan is to use the flutter_rust_bridge to make use of automerge v2, which is a full CRDT implementation written in Rust that has the advantage of having a very simple API to work with (basically a key/value store).

Yes. I asked the devs about ideas for this in this ticket and got an interesting response. It's aimed towards server-side handling, but the same ideas apply to local storage as well.

There are a lot of implementations of CRDTs out there. In JavaScript, for instance, we have Y.js (https://github.com/yjs/yjs) and automerge (https://github.com/automerge/automerge). There’s also a Y.js demo (https://demos.yjs.dev/prosemirror/prosemirror.html) that allows you to play around with them and have your own collaborative app running in just a few seconds. All messages are exchange via webRTC and manages the state via CRDTs. This can be a great sandbox to understand how CRDTs work and see.

Anyone unsure of what a CRDT is, this is the perfect intro: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

The two most widely used CRDT implementations (combining JSON like general purpose types and rich text editing types) are:

- Automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge

- Yjs https://github.com/yjs/yjs

For instance, practicing "local first web" using automerge with all it's Distributed Persistence Primitives on CRDT's and Vector Clocks - i.e. when the Browser View is treated like a Database replica, essentially; or adopting a real data mapper that's giving you an API from your database Schema, using Prisma or Hasura... or even implementing a custom codegenereted one, as a babel plugin, on top of TSED and Micro-ORM.