A comparison of JavaScript CRDTs

Collaboration is one of the most requested features on uMap. I’ve talked in previous articles how we could add real-time features “the simple way”, by:

This works well in general, but it doesn’t take care of conflicts handling, especially when a disconnect can happen.

For this reason, I got more into “Conflict-free Resolution Data Types” (CRDTs), with the goal of understanding what they are, how they work, what are the different libraries out there, and which one would be a good fit for us, if any.

Conflict-free Resolution Data Types are a family of data types able to merge their states with other states without generating conflicts. They handle consistency in distributed systems, making them particularly well-suited for collaborative real-time applications.

CRDTs ensure that multiple participants can make changes without strict coordination, and all replicas converge to the same state upon synchronization, without conflicts.

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