CRDT & Mergable Replicated Datatypes

Conflict-free replicated datatypes is a set of datatypes that, unlike Git, guarantees that you can merge them without ever producing a merge conflict. This seems really powerful, but comes with a few big disatvantages. CRDT's are very specialiced datatypes with specific trade-offs for how they guarantee to be conflict free. Their usually really meta-data heavy.

Relevant articles

• I was wrong. CRDTs are the future

• 5000x faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization

• Trade-offs between Different CRDTs

• An Interactive Intro to CRDTs

• Rope science, part 8 - CRDTs for concurrent editing

• CRDT Survey, Part 2: Semantic Techniques

Libraries

• Martin Klepmann's Automerge - a library which provides fast implementations of several different CRDTs, a compact compression format for these CRDTs, and a sync protocol for efficiently transmitting those changes over the network

  • autosurgeon - a Rust library for working with data in automerge documents

  • Automerge Repo - a wrapper for the Automerge CRDT library which provides facilities to support working with many documents at once, as well as pluggable networking and storage

• Loro - Make your JSON data collaborative and version-controlled

  • Loro crdt-richtext - Rust implementation of Peritext and Fugue

• cr-sqlite - Convergent replicated SQLite

• Yjs

Other approaches

• Irmin - A distributed database built on the same principles as Git. Irmin is an OCaml library for building mergeable, branchable distributed data stores.