Thread by @adamhjk

I haven't used Fluid, but I just devoured all the info on it, and I want to share why I think it should be a game changer for most of us.

https://twitter.com/mattetti/status/1303753863950790656

First - doing large scale collaborative state transitions is really hard if you want it to feel fast. The number of different factors at play range from the low-level wire protocol to the high level application design. It all has to be right, or you get very hard bugs.

Until now, I suspect most everyone wound up taking either the Operational Transform route or the CRDT route. What Microsoft did here was cleverly different (unique? certainly to me, and I've done a lot of reading and implementing here)

Essentially they split it up into 3 different layers. A "container" where the data + application logic lives. When you're operating at this layer, you're doing "easy" data structure work. It will feel pretty much like writing to an object/array/string.

Under the hood, it translates those into the operations needed, and submits them to a central service. That service gives them a total unique order. This is the key to what they've done - basically, they moved the clock for changes to a central spot.

By doing that, they got to do two things. One, they made it possible to scale well - the central store does very little: assign an atomic counter, distribute operations to clients, and create (and store) summaries to make things fast later.

If you've ever used Vuex/Redux/MobX, imagine getting the same behavior, but it's automatically synchronized at the session level across devices. With a UX that hides all the specialty stuff under the hood.

The genius of the design is that you could easily replicate and change the layers, and they've clearly thought about that. You can plug in different transports. You'll almost always build a custom storage layer anyway. Probably custom summarization too.

It's honestly a glorious piece of software architecture. I bet it works a fucking treat, because that design really should sing like a choir at christmas.