GOTO Conferences
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2017–2020
51:36 · 46K views · Dec 21, 2016
Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.
Treated as the go-to approachable yet deep primer on CRDTs and collaborative editing, recommended repeatedly in threads on Automerge, local-first software and OT versus CRDT.
13 comments from Hacker News
> Indeed, the literature of CRDT does specify a mathematically correct answer. But this does not always line up with what humans would find the most faithful rendering of intent. This is a very salient point that anyone thinking of using CRDTs to "solve" synchronization in an user-facing application needs to take into consideration. Yes, CRDTs will guarantee that clients converge to an identical, mathematically "consistent" state eventually, but there's no guarantee whether or not that mathematically "consistent" state would make any sense to the application business logic that needs to consume that state, or to the human that needs to reason about the rendered result. That is a completely different can of worms that we'll still have to tackle to build a usable application. Here's great example to illustrate this from Martin Kleppmann's talk on this topic: this video Rest of the talk is also highly recommended for anyone interested in an approachable primer on CRDTs. The trade-offs to CRDTs mentioned by the author in the context of text-editors make sense, but I would be curious to hear from the Xray team on what their current thinking on the topic is, given that they have collaborative editing as an explicit core objective (which might shift the value prop in favor of using CRDTs relatively speaking since in Xi it seems to be only an aspirational goal), and that their approach to implementation was similar but not quite identical to Xi's: > Our use of a CRDT is similar to the X
Is this website related to the popular [LINK] ? Holy cow, this is an intense article, with great definitions for a bunch of detailed variations of distribute system jargon, and even has some nice images to explain the ideas! My specialty is in eventually consistent data types, which there section is much smaller on, but they have some links to follow up on CRDT stuff. > are often limited in functionality and impose performance overheads This is for the most part true, with CRDTs. However we just formalized and proposed in a new paper, with some Stanford colleagues, how to construct a generalizable CRDT. One that actually lets other more case-specific CRDTs be built on top of it, which we use at gunDB, so that way you can get the advantages of the more optimized CRDTs but still have the rest of your data glued together. Another set of really interesting CRDTs which they didn't mention, are the ones used for making decentralized versions of Google Doc: - Martin's Kleppmann has an exceptionally great/interesting talk on this: this video - And we recently did a "layman" animated explainer of a similar algorithm, that explains it for the non-academically minded, with simple analogies to "distributed systems" that happen in every day life: [LINK] I'll definitely be referencing the OP's article in the future though. Even though I'm in this world, I constantly get the vernacular mixed up. And this will be a really great dictionary to use.
I've spent almost a decade working on CRDTs, largely from an industry perspective but also some academic side. They're great, and not too hard to understand if you take time to think about them. Here are some animated/interactive cartoon explainers we've made to help teach the concepts: - How a CRDT version of Operational Transformation (Google Docs) works: [LINK] - Why CRDTs are better than centralized alternatives like PAXOS/RAFT: [LINK] Martin Kleppmann's work (author of Automerge) is outstanding, especially check out: this video
CRDTs are quite actively discussed in the IPFS community, in particular here: [LINK] (lots of great resources if you're interested in CRDTs) Also check out automerge, a CRDT that aims to be as JSON-like as possible: [LINK] Martin Kleppmann (one of the creators of Automerge) has given several great in-depth talks about it, eg. this video
CRDTs are great, and I've seen a lot of quality in Christopher's work. A few other resources for those interested in CRDT subject: - Our cartoon explainer [LINK] - An excellent talk by Martin Kleppmann this video - Marc Shapiro's in depth talk [LINK]