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tonsky

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tonsky
·last year·discuss
Clojure Electric is different. It’s not really a sync, it’s more of a thin client. It relies of having fast connection to server at all times, and re-fetches everything all the time. They innovation is that they found a really, really ergonomic way to do it
tonsky
·last year·discuss
If you think of an existing database, like Postgres, sure. It’s not very convenient.

What I am saying is, in a perfect world, database and server will be the one and run code _and_ data at the same time. There’s really no good reason why they are separated, and it causes a lot of inconveniences right now.
tonsky
·last year·discuss
Ah, no. Not really. People sometimes think about conflict resolution as a problem that needs to be solved. But it’s not solvable, not really. It’s part of the domain, it’s not going anywhere, it’s irreducible complexity.

You _will_ have conflicts (because your app is distributed and there are concurrent writes). They will happen on semantic level, so only you (app developer) _will_ be able to solve them. Database (or any other magical tool) can’t do it for you.

Another misconception is that conflict resolution needs to be “solved” perfectly before any progress can be made. That is not true as well. You might have unhandled conflicts in your system and still have a working, useful, successful product. Conflicts might be rare, insignificant, or people (your users) will just correct for/work around them.

I am not saying “drop data on the floor”, of course, if you can help it. But try not to overthink it, either.
tonsky
·last year·discuss
> There's no such thing as reliable network in the world

I’m not saying there is
tonsky
·last year·discuss
- You can have many sync engines

- Sync engines might only solve small and medium scale, that would be a huge win even without large scale
tonsky
·last year·discuss
It’s not as simple as you make it sound:

- Reliable communication is hard - Optimistic writes should on client are hard - Tracking subsets of data is hard (you don't want the entirety of Datomic on the client, do you?) - Permissions are hard in this model

Why didn't I implement it? Mostly comes down to free time. It's a hobby project and it's hard to find time for it. I also stopped writing web apps so immediate pressure for this went away.