Downsides of Offline First
I’m a “true believer” in CRDTs, which I have some experience in. You can implement a useful CRDT for simple applications in under 100 lines if all you care about are standard database objects - like maps, sets and values. List CRDTs are where they get complicated, but most applications aren’t collaborative text editors.The promise of CRDTs is that unlike most conflict resolution systems, you can layer over a crdt library and basically ignore all the implantation details. Applications should (can) mostly ignore how a CRDT works when building up the stack.The biggest roadblock to their use is that they’re poorly understood. Well, that and implementation maturity. Automerge-rs merged a PR the other day which brought a 5 minute benchmark run down to 2 seconds. But by bit we’re getting there.