yjs VS automerge-rs

One idea is just to use fewer random bits in peerIDs. Yjs (https://docs.yjs.dev/) gets away with just 32 random bits. If you compromise and use 64 random bits, then even a very popular doc with 1 million lifetime peerIDs will have a < 10^-7 lifetime probability of collision.

I've seen it come up often in collaborative text editors.

Also see: https://github.com/yjs/yjs

You are absolutely right that XML is better for document structures.

My current theory is that Yjs [0] is the new JSON+XML. It gives you both JSON and XML types in one nested structure, all with conflict free merging via incremental updates.

Also, you note the issue with XML and overlapping inline markup. Yjs has an answer for that with its text type, you can apply attributes (for styling or anything else) via arbatary ranges. They can overlap.

Obviously I'm being a little hypabolic suggesting it will replace JSON, the beauty of JSON is is simplicity, but for many systems building on Yjs or similar CRDT based serialisation systems is the future.

https://github.com/yjs/yjs/

Note: https://github.com/yjs/yjs for collaborative "document edition, and user cursors"; has WebRTC, web socket, matrix.org backend

CCP needs to revamp proto anyway, due to recent exploits... practically, nothing really prevents 'em from using some sort of CRDT's to make the state of the sig view eventually consistent (yjs lib, if we're speaking frontendian).

Yjs framework: Because it is a CRDT implementation which provides collaborative editing and offline-first capability.

No problem. The database CRUD features are just helpers as an abstraction on top of yjs: https://docs.yjs.dev/. Eweser adds schemas in the form of typescript types to make using it simpler, more structured, and interoperability easier.

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).

I've been watching automerge-rs like a hawk, because they seem to be the only CRDT implementation where you don't need a Mathematics master to understand how to use it. They've been working on a rewrite for the last two years, hopefully they'll do a new release soon.

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.