Presentation: Real-Time, Fine-Grained Version Control With CRDTs

Last year, GitHub released Teletype, a package that adds support for real-time collaborative editing to the Atom text editor. Historically, similar systems such as Google Docs have based their implementations on Operational Transformation, which has been an area of active CS research for nearly 30 years. For Teletype, we tried a different approach, building on a newer theoretical framework called Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types, or CRDTs. Introduced in 2011, CRDTs offer a simple and general framework for synchronizing distributed replicas of non-trivial data structures, and they proved a great fit for collaborative editing. Having validated CRDTs in a production setting with Teletype, we're now exploring how we can take them further with an experimental system called Eon. Eon will enable what can best be described as "real-time version control". In this talk, I'll cover the foundations of CRDTs, then explore how we're using them in Eon to synchronize and persist changes to a repository at the granularity of individual keystrokes.