Convergence is not enough • Hacker News Board

Re: Convergence is not enough

#11

Post by TacticalCoder » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

> Martin Kleppmann, Vincent Liu, Owen Lynch, and their collaborators are tackling the problem head-on in Coln, a mergeable database with an expressive language for schemas, queries, and migrations. In Coln, you can declare constraints on your data — “this is a doubly-linked list”, say — and it takes a refreshingly strict line on violations: if merging would break a constraint, the merge is simply refused

Isn't that similar to the "theory of patches", like implemented in Pijul?

Re: Convergence is not enough

#12

Post by sls » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #10

> every object, class, and method — is an Automerge document Sounds an awful lot like the Google Wave experiment but on steroids. And we know how it ended.

I'm having a hard time believing (a) that you think Wave failed because of the tech stack, and also (b) that you think when a product launch fails, all products that conceptualize the market/problem in that category will also fail.

I'm hesitating to post this, but really, if that's not what you're saying, it feels like trying to make a zinger has overwhelmed your actual point.

Re: Convergence is not enough

#13

Post by fellowniusmonk » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #6

Animats wrote: post #3

This is apparently based on Automerge.[1] It sounds like a really good idea. Is it a good enough idea to sync MMO game clients and servers? Paper from 2012, last Automerge site update in 2025. Why isn't this everywhere? [1] https://automerge.org/

> Is it a good enough idea to sync MMO game clients and servers? After 15 years in the trenches on this stuff, no I don’t think so. Some operations need a clearly defined order for correctness. For example, financial transactions or items moving between inventories. CRDTs don’t provide this. CRDTs are great when it makes sense for a local peer to own changes. Like Git. I think automerge and friends would make for exc…

Thank you for all your work on CRDTs, I think dt is still the coolest leap I've seen in software and frankly in thinking about the universe.