shelf VS noms

I think you could encode a “shelf” last-write-wins CRDT into your HTML using data attributes without exploding your file size. You would need to add a data-version attribute, and if you want to support hand-editing or editing by programs that don’t understand the CRDT, a CRC32 or other parity as data-parity so your loader can tell when a user might have edited a row without updating data-version.

Shelf is really simple - the JS implementation is tiny (https://github.com/dglittle/shelf) and a walkthrough of the algorithm here: https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/shelf-crdt/amp/

It wouldn’t handle character level sync - but would let you merge documents at a rows/items/blocks level.

The CRDT I was referencing was Shelf by Greg Little. He's given a few talks about it at the braid meetups. When he first showed it off, Kevin Jahns (the Yjs author) was also there and was as impressed as I was:

https://braid.org/meeting-8

The code is all here. Its tiny:

https://github.com/dglittle/shelf

This is from 2022. It is based on Noms [1], which is no longer maintained (they forked it).

I think the Noms doc linked from this article [2] is clearer than the article itself. That said I sill cannot turn my head around to grasp how this entire thing work tbh. I hope they wrote a peer reviewed paper to serve the audience better.

[1] https://github.com/attic-labs/

[2] https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.md#...

I am. But i know very little about CRDTs lol, so we'll see how that goes. I'm interested in converting some immutable, local-first data warehouse tooling i enjoy to a CRDT version. Prior it was more.. Git-like. Basically just Git with data structures inspired-massively from Noms[1].

The thing i've found most interesting is it appears[2] that CRDT backends need to expose CRDT flavored types to users. Which is to say how i'm writing this combines the notion of a type, say `[i32]` with how you want the merges to work. CRDT works great but based on my amateur-hour researching on the subject i don't feel you can write a single CRDT merge strategy for a single data type ala `[i32]` and have it be always correct. Applications need to indicate enough context on what makes sense for a given data type.

So yea, i agree with you. I'm interested in making a database-like thing, backed by CRDTs, but i also have seen very few general purpose implementations with CRDTs. It feels like i'm breaking "new ground", while having no idea what i'm doing and having no intention of being an actual researcher here. I'm just making apps i enjoy heh.

[1]: https://github.com/attic-labs/noms

Most of the changes are in the noms package which used to live in a separate repo (https://github.com/attic-labs/noms), but Dolt has since adopted them.

Not much more to say other than Noms was my favorite project (https://github.com/attic-labs/noms) for a while until acquisition and the engineers are now the ones behind Replicache (https://replicache.dev/).

I think this is going to be the next "Realm" that works everywhere.

The storage layer based on Noms: https://github.com/attic-labs/noms

Noms might be what you’re looking for (https://github.com/attic-labs/noms). Dolt is actually a fork of Noms.

People that are interested in a similar feature set should check out https://github.com/attic-labs/noms and the SQL fork of Noms, https://github.com/dolthub/dolt