It's astonishing to me how difficult it (still) is to design a syncable local-first data model.
I keep thinking I've found a decent way, then realizing its flaws, then despondently noticing that the flaws were already discussed in Ink & Switch's article: inkandswitch.com/local-first.ht
Conversation
do you think there's value in non-syncable, non-collaborative "local-first" ? or where maybe those come from just working with git/github instead of hard to perfect models?
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Yeah, definitely. In fact, I tried hard to design a format which could just be synced as dumb flat files without constant conflicts. But in practice, any app which needs database-like features (querying, indexing) will find this quite difficult.
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conflicts from single user use? or with external merging like w/ git?
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Single-user use, yes.
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are you referring to a specific format i can look at?
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My format is too much in flux to be legible, but this one solves similar problems:
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what if the authoritative model was in memory?
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These databases can easily be tens of megabytes; it'd have to be streaming at minimum to avoid awful cold launch times.
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is awful like 1s for 100mb?
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Replying to
I don't think I could actually deserialize 100MB of application data in 1s on a phone, but say I could—then what would you do as a syncing solution?