UNIVAX: How not to implement collaborative editing

(stab 3)

All the code in here is meant as a motivating example for a talk on CRDTs.

The hope is that the code will be complicated enough, or the latency bad enough, or the fact that we're implementing a whole text editor self-evidently ridiculous enough, that CRDTs will seem amazing by comparison.

See http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble/ for some reasons why this is a bad idea:

One of the things I've loved most about working with the Brackets source is that it uses so much of the the best of the open web. Its ~1.3 million lines of code offer APIs for things things like:

• code hinting, static analysis, and linting
• language parsing and tokenizing (html, css, js, xml, less)
• file system operations
• editors
• live DOM diff'ing and in-browser preview
• swappable servers
• layout, widgets, and dialogs
• localization, theming, and preferences
• extension loading at runtime, with hundreds already written

There are other approaches, but they all have problems. See Clobberation and Quilljoy.