Is GUN suitable for building collaborative text editor using causal-tree merging strategy?

[coodoo]

The plan is to put a n array of chars into GUN db, let it syncs to all clients, and each client do the merging work using causal-tree strategy (by comparing the lamport timestamp to decide who wins), wondering is this something supported by GUN? Thanks.

[amark]

Yes, I did a demo a long time ago here: https://youtu.be/rci89p0o2wQ

We even did an entire interactive explainer article on it: http://gun.js.org/explainers/school/class.html

GUN's base CRDT allows for other CRDTs (like a causal-tree) to be implemented on top, so you could do your own custom algorithm. For instance a counter CRDT is implemented here in just 12 LOC: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/snippets-(v0.3.x)#counter

But note, GUN does not support JS-style arrays (it has no way to determine if the arrays are atomic, strongly ordered, or loosely ordered), GUN does support sets (tables/collections/lists), and strongly ordered linked-lists can be implemented on top of it, as well as loosely ordered (streamable) items as explained here: http://gun.js.org/explainers/basketball/basketball.html

Would love to see you implement a text editor!!! What are you building it for? I'd love to see it!

(note: this should be a StackOverflow Q, not a bug report, so I'll be closing. Any chance you could copy&paste your Q and my answer into stackoverflow?)

[coodoo]

Thanks for the response and details, I'm primarily doing research on various eventually consistent data store for an upcoming project, will keep you posted if I ended up using gun for that!

[amark]

@coodoo yes, please. :)