Technology and Gadgets

The term CRDT stands for _**C**onflict-free **D**ata **T**ypes_ and until recently has been more of an ideal or the focus of an academic research paper. The idea behind these data types is that they provide a means to ensure a distributed system can allow any given client the ability to make updates to shared data and be assured that it will become _eventually consistent_ with other peers.

The problem has traditionally been performance and the cost of each client needing to have large audits of every change in both memory and disk. Unlike **Operational Transforms** which can rely on a central server to provide guarentees around "ordering", a CRTD can be fully decentralized but must somehow provide ordering amoungst peers. This is it's biggest strength but until recently had too many handicaps to making it practical.