Chronofold: a data structure for versioned text

02/21/2020

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by   Victor Grishchenko, et al.

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Collaborative text editing and versioning is known to be a tough topic. Diffs, OT and CRDT are three relevant classes of algorithms which all have their issues. CRDT is the only one that works correctly and deterministically in a distributed environment, at the unfortunate cost of data structure complexity and metadata overheads. A chronofold is a data structure for editable linear collections based on the Causal Tree CRDT model. A chronofold maintains time-ordering and space-ordering of its elements. Simply put, a it is both a log and a text at the same time, which makes it very convenient for text versioning and synchronization. Being a simple array-based data structure with O(1) insertions, chronofold makes CRDT overheads acceptable for many practical applications.