crdt-benchmarks VS state

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

Hi! Great questions :)

First of all, SyncedStore does not implement any CRDT algorithms. Credits for this go to Yjs [1] (and its author Kevin), which it uses as underlying CRDT.

Yjs and Automerge are (afaik) the two most commonly used CRDT implementations. Both have their pros and cons, but Yjs has focused a lot on performance [2].

Automerge has a bit friendlier "Immer style" [3] API. I'm not too familiar with @localfirst/state, but it seems to add a Redux style API on top of Automerge.

My approach with SyncedStore was really to provide an API on top of Yjs that's as simple as possible to use in React / Vue / Svelte or plain JS app. I.e.: only use a single React Hook to observe changes, and use regular Javascript assigments to update values. The API is inspired mostly by Reactive Programming libraries such as MobX [4] (from the same author as Immer).

Hope you're still following along :) Maybe it helps to compare the TODO-MVC applications, as both SyncedStore (https://github.com/YousefED/SyncedStore/tree/main/examples) and @localfirst/state (https://github.com/local-first-web/state/tree/main/examples/...) have implemented these as examples!

[1]: https://github.com/yjs/yjs