Are CRDTs suitable for shared editing?
I’m part of the team that makes Zoho Writer (Google Docs alternative) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zoho.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;writer.zoho.com</a><p>Back in 2009, we wrote our real time collaboration component  using Operational Transformations (OT). But when CRDTs started to gain the spotlight, these are the reasons why it didn’t warrant a rewrite to our stack:<p>#1 Memory issues with tombstones. Marking as deletion has a cost of maintaining them throughout the session.<p>#2 CRDTs were perfect for plain strings and arbitrary key&#x2F;value pairs. But when it comes to schematic JSON that has semantic value CRDT was an added overhead. For example, try making a collaborative HTML editor with support for table operations. It is very likely you will end up with a table structure that is invalid to render. In OT analysing, modifying or cancelling ops were much easier.<p>#3 Since the software is primarily a cloud document editor, a central server is necessary even otherwise. So why not use the server for efficient version management and operation sequencing as well? Why prefer CRDTs whose bulk of complexity comes from eliminating the need of a central system?<p>Such practical reasons have kept us from venturing into CRDTs. As of now, common editing platforms like Google Docs, Zoho Writer, CKeditor, ProseMirror, Quill, CodeMirror - all of these work with OTs instead of CRDT for collaborative editing.