rust-crdt VS automerge-rs

See also, Autosurgeon (with a 0.3.0 release today), which is a higher level API on top of Automerge for Rust:

I'm building a mobile app with a server backend, and I was looking for resources to build them in an offline-first way (since unlike on the browser, people expect to use apps offline, if they can, such as fitness or habit trackers).

I found the concept of conflict-free relational data types (CRDTS) interesting as it allows you to have fully offline experiences while also having a conflict-free syncing experience. I was looking for some good libraries and came across automerge [0] and yrs [1], but both had some rough APIs as they're primarily low-level Rust libraries that are wrapped by higher-level TypeScript APIs.

Autosurgeon wraps the low-level API of automerge to make it much more ergonomic, closer to the TypeScript experience, but in Rust of course. You can for example use `struct`s which autosurgeon will serialize and deserialize automatically, which is not present in base automerge, which focuses more on string keys and arbitrary values.

I am planning on using this together with Flutter and flutter_rust_bridge [2] in order to use this same Rust library everywhere. In this case, the server just becomes another (albeit more privileged) client.

[0] https://github.com/automerge/automerge-rs

[1] https://github.com/y-crdt/y-crdt

[2] https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge

I found the concept of conflict-free relational data types (CRDTS) interesting as it allows you to have fully offline experiences while also having a conflict-free syncing experience. I was looking for some good libraries and came across automerge and yrs, but both had some rough APIs as they're primarily low-level libraries that are wrapped by TypeScript APIs.

Yes, the plan is to use PostgreSQL. I had a discussion with one of the devs in this ticket about the strategy for this.

In any case, my current plan is to use Automerge for the data handling itself (so I can easily do collaboration), but that crate doesn't handle on-disk storage. For this I need another solution, and a K/V store is well suited for this task.

15 years working in software, Rust has been my favourite language for the last 2. Recently completed a contract to prototype a distributed Tailscale-inspired VPN built on Ink and Switch's CRDT project automerge-rs.

Complex topic. There's a very easy-to-use CRDT library for Rust (automerge), while there isn't much support for operational transforms (although Aper is new to me, I have to check it out).

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

By the way despite that particular repo (@localfirst/state) last being touched 6 months ago, Herb Caudill definitely seems still active in this space (I believe he's been working on other parts of this more recently -- e.g. ideas about authentication), and I think automerge development itself is quite active right now leading up to a 1.0 release which seems fairly imminent, for which a lot of fundamental work has been done, also coordinating with automerge-rs.

I assume you are following

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

I'm hoping this matures a bit more in the next months, seems really promising.