What does HackerNews think of peritext?
A CRDT for asynchronous rich-text collaboration, where authors can work independently and then merge their changes.
Language:
TypeScript
Take a look at https://automerge.org/ and the stack those folks are building. You're exactly right that it's a difficult balance (specifically the trick is proving commutativity for the domain-specific data of your application). But automerge (and then https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext) show it's at least possible. Good stuff.
To put it in a different perspective, plain text editing has well-solved CRDT patterns. But, semantic data-structures like rich-text or syntax trees is what's tricky and has unsolved challenges.
Peritext[1] is the only one that came close to solving rich-text, but even that one left out important aspect of rich-text editing like handling list & table operations as "work to be done later".
For people interested on why it's difficult to build CRDTs for richtext, here's a piece I wrote a year back: https://writer.zohopublic.com/writer/published/grcwy5c699d67...
Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29433896
Source code (in TypeScript) here: https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext