A Gentle Introduction to CRDTs – vlcn.io
February 10, 2025
Conflict Free Replicated Data types (CRDTs) can be tricky. You may spend months reading papers and implementing different algorithms before they finally click and become simple. That or they’ll seem simple out of the gate and you’ll be missing a bunch of nuance.What follows is an attempt at distilling all the hard understanding work into a condensed and easy to understand set of reading for a software developer without any background in CRDTs or distributed systems.
Local first approaches to software development have been around a little while, but may be gaining some momentum.
A Local first app
has its data co-located with its UI, works offline, synchronizes between clients. And that lets its users own their data.
But a challenge for such apps is synchronising data.
Conflict Free Replicated Data types (CRDTs) are a potential solution to this. This article gives a detailed introduction–but you won’t have to do all the heavy lifting, with the likes of the opensource yjs.
