alt Hacker NewsIt's disingenuous to suggest that "Yjs will completely destroy and re-create the entire document on every single keystroke" and that this is "by design" of Yjs. This is a design limitation of the official y-Prosemirror bindings that are integrating two distinct (and complex) projects. The post is implying that this is a flaw in the core Yjs library and an issue with CRDTs as a whole. This is not the case.
It is very true that there are nuances you have to deal with when using CRDT toolkits like Yjs and Automerge - the merged state is "correct" as a structure, but may not match your scheme. You have to deal with that into your application (Prosemirror does this for you, if you want it, and can live with the invalid nodes being removed)
You can't have your cake and eat it with CRDTs, just as you can't with OT. Both come with compromises and complexities. Your job as a developer is to weigh them for the use case you are designing for.
One area in particular that I feel CRDTs may really shine is in agentic systems. The ability to fork+merge at will is incredibly important for async long running tasks. You can validate the state after an agent has worked, and then decide to merge to main or not. Long running forks are more complex to achieve with OT.
There is some good content in this post, but it's leaning a little too far towards drama creation for my tast.
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Author here, sorry if this was not clear: that specific point was not supposed to be an indictment of all CRDTs, it was supposed to be much more narrow. Specifically, the Yjs authors clearly state that they purposefully designed its interface to ProseMirror to delete and recreate the entire document on every collab keystroke, and the fact that it stayed open for 6 YEARS before they started to try to fix it, does in my opinion indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern text editors need to behave well in any situation. Not even a collaborative one. Just any situation at all.
I think it's defensible to say that this point in particular is not indicting CRDTs in general because I do say the authors are trying to fix it, and then I link to the (unpublicized) first PR in that chain of work (which very few people know about!), and I specifically spend a whole paragraph saying I hope that I a forced to write an article in a year about how they figured it all out! If I was trying to be disingenuous, why do any of that?
You can split CRDT libs and compose them however you want, but most teams never get past the blessed bindings, because stitching two moving targets together by hand is miserable even if you know both codebases. Then you're chasing a perf cliff and weird state glitches every time one side revs.
In theory you can write better bindings yourself. In practice, if the official path falls over under normal editing, telling people to just do more integration work sounds a lot like moving the goalposts.