What does HackerNews think of pushpin?

CRDT resources | Oct 2021

Most of the CRDT examples I've seen appear to be Electron apps e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin.

My understanding is that CRDT's rely on having a safe place to store data on the user's machine (otherwise it's a bit like doing a `git clone` to receive new data, rather than a `git pull`).

Is this not a major limitation for people hoping to use it for web apps?

Farm – an experiment in distributed peer-to-peer computing | Jul 2021

Expand Context ↕

One way to think about it: some of ink & switch's other projects use hypermerge to manage data/state e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin. In farm, we use hypermerge for data and source code. As a result, not only are farm applications local-first*, the development and distribution of those applications is also local-first and collaborative.

*https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html

CRDTs are the future | Sep 2020

CRDTs seem very promising, but we still have a long way to go. The most exciting work in this area is being done by Ink&Switch [0]. They have a number of interesting real-world app prototypes based on CRDTs.

- An interesting case where CRDTs failed is Xi-editor, where they tried to use CRDTs as the basis for a plugin system [1,2].

- One of the biggest problems with CRDTs is the overhead needed to keep track of the full document history. The automerge [3] project has been working on efficient compression of CRDTs for JSON datatypes.

- The idea of monotonic updates is really appealing at first, but I was disappointed when I realized there's no good solution to handle deletions. Tombstones, to me, seem like kind of a hack, albeit a necessary one. Practically, CRDTs aren't the silver bullet they might seem like at first.

- Another lesson learned is that when ten people are editing the same paragraph, there's not really a right answer. I think the key to implementing CRDTs is doing it at the correct level of granularity.

- ProseMirror intentionally chose NOT to use CRDTs [4].

- Some more good references are [5,6,7]

[0] https://inkandswitch.com/

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19886883

[3] https://github.com/automerge and https://github.com/automerge/pushpin

[4] https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html

[5] Kleppmann 2020, "CRDTs: The Hard Parts" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7drE24geUw with HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802208

[6] Kleppmann 2019, "Interleaving Anomalies in Text Editors" https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/interleaving-papoc19.pdf

[7] https://abishov.com/xi-editor/docs/crdt-details.html

Local-first software (2019) | Aug 2020

Hello, we've published some more work in this space -- no HTML version yet, but here's a more recent paper on our PushPin project.

https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/pushpin-papoc20.pdf

You can also try PushPin for yourself: https://github.com/automerge/pushpin/

likely outdated binaries are available here: https://automerge.github.io/pushpin/

Also, we're currently in the midst of a new project called Cambria, exploring some of the consequences and data demands for a new Cambrian-era of software here: https://inkandswitch.github.io/cambria/