I like the approach of using differential synchronization at the edges of a CRDT system. It seems like this approach can work well for plaintext data, or data easily reduced to a fixed set of plaintext fields.
For more advanced formats - like a tree structure document - I’m intimidated by the problem of computing a good semantic diff from the plaintext format, and how to apply that semantic diff to the CRDT format. Adding an `id` to every node in the tree is helpful for this purpose - but that makes it harder to write such documents by hand in plaintext.
Have you encountered any troubles with weird diffs that put documents into invalid states? For example, plaintext updates that somehow merge in a way that breaks the MDX or JS syntax? Do you have or foresee having a “resolve merge conflicts” flow?
Indeed, there's always the risk of breaking a document, since we are dealing with raw edits to a Markdown/MDX/code file. This is very well described by the Ink & Switch team working on Peritext (https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext), when it comes to WYSIWYG editor operations (bold, links, etc.). This is a more general issue of making semantically wise decisions in your merge strategy, and it's exacerbated in real-time collaborative settings (we sort of mitigate that in an asynchronous, Git-like workflow by reviewing commits / ensuring they compile before they are merged). We haven't dealt with this yet, but this will be really interesting, especially when it comes to merging code blocks.
For more advanced formats - like a tree structure document - I’m intimidated by the problem of computing a good semantic diff from the plaintext format, and how to apply that semantic diff to the CRDT format. Adding an `id` to every node in the tree is helpful for this purpose - but that makes it harder to write such documents by hand in plaintext.
Have you encountered any troubles with weird diffs that put documents into invalid states? For example, plaintext updates that somehow merge in a way that breaks the MDX or JS syntax? Do you have or foresee having a “resolve merge conflicts” flow?