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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

This is still a hard problem today. Some hard tech was built for this. I'm excited for a world where this is more accessible and less hardcore than something like CRDTs (in terms of accessibility).

How have others noticed the world shifting in the past 6 years?

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There are now a few sync engines that tackle this problem. Rocicorp Zero, Electric SQL, and one or two others. By no means a crowded space, but there are options now.

edit: links

  https://zero.rocicorp.dev/
  https://electric-sql.com/

Have you had a chance to use either of these yet? Electric looks like an obvious mature choice — curious if you think Zero's approach is compelling enough to be worth trying in alpha

Haven't used either of them. I met the guy behind Zero and he's super smart. He had been working on Replicache for a long time before he started this thing.

That being said, I haven't tried them, so can't really give an educated opinion. But I feel pretty confident in the domain expertise on the Zero team.

All the fundamentals have existed for at least 26 years. So, no, not really.

It's also really weird to use video game terminology and ignore the fact that all of the approaches used in this article have in fact, been done by major game engines, are readily documented in game development circles, etc.

It reads like an undergrad discovering game development for the first time. None of this is novel. It wasn't even novel for a web or desktop application to use.

Can you say more about which prior art you think overlaps here? We have a similar use case to Figma and are implementing a similar solution. I'm not particularly concerned whether the path we're following is novel but I am particularly concerned with whether there are gotchas along it that we should be watching out for, so if there are more mature solutions, we'd be interested.

Multiplayer video games are the big one. There's no reason why you couldn't apply the same kind of synchronization to a web app. You'll just need to decide on an approach because not all games do it the same way. Most likely you'd want rollback netcode.

Indeed, Replicache works this way, using server reconciliation (one part of client-side prediction): https://doc.replicache.dev/concepts/how-it-works

Read QuakeWorld 1999, client-server prediction, Counter-Strike: Source lag compensation.