The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing · HackerPapers discussions

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — HN submission

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:06:11 GMT

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

3 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — mentioned by josephg

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:01:35 GMT

This is a pretty good description of RGA (Replicated Growable Array). Which is a list & text CRDT that works pretty well in practice. Automerge used to use this algorithm for text editing, before moving across to FugueMax. This algorithm has another obscure downside: It has interleaving problems if you insert items backwards. If two users do a series of inserts in reverse order, their inserts will get interleaved in a weird, unpredictable way. Eg, if I type "aaaaa" (as a series of prepended inserts) and you type "bbbb" in the same way, we can end up with "ababababa" or "aabbabbaa" some…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — mentioned by mweidner

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 15:12:17 GMT

In my experience, this depends a lot more on the implementation than the CRDT algorithm. If you implement Causal Trees directly (as a tree with one node per char), it will be tolerably fast but use a lot of memory + storage. If you instead group chars into "runs" of sequentially-inserted chars and only store one Causal Tree node per run, it should be quite efficient. Yjs (a widely used text CRDT) describes these sort of opts here: https://blog.kevinjahns.de/are-crdts-suitable-for-shared-edi... For a different tree-based CRDT, I did a head-to-head comparison of implementations that use a…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — HN submission

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 19:06:53 GMT

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

1 point; 3 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — HN submission

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 05:39:37 GMT

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

1 point; 2 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing — HN submission

Tue, 02 May 2023 16:12:47 GMT

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

15 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.