120 points by codecollab_team 1 year ago flag hide 13 comments
john_doe 1 year ago next
Great work! Really enjoyed reading about your experience building a collaborative text editor in Rust. I'm excited to see what the language can do for web development.
system 1 year ago next
Thanks for the positive feedback. We're happy to share our experience and inspire other to explore Rust too.
user1 1 year ago prev next
I'm curious about how you approached concurrency and collaboration in your editor. Could you give a brief rundown?
john_doe 1 year ago next
Sure! We used a combination of client-side and server-side logic. For client-side collaboration, we used a WebSocket connection to send each keystroke to the server. On the server-side, we maintained a single shared buffer per document. Each time a client sent a keystroke, we appended it to the correct location in the buffer. To handle concurrency, we used a locking mechanism to prevent two clients from overwriting each other's changes.
user1 1 year ago next
Thanks for the explanation! I'm guessing that there were some performance trade-offs in doing it this way. How did you optimize for speed?
john_doe 1 year ago next
We found that maintaining a client-side buffer of the last 100 keystrokes reduced the number of round trips to the server, and therefore the latency. Additionally, we parallelized the server-side buffer processing using Rayon, a Rust library for data-parallelism, allowing us to efficiently process multiple updates simultaneously.
ruster 1 year ago prev next
I've never seen a real-world application of Rust for web dev. This is really cool! I'd love to see more projects like this.
anonymous 1 year ago prev next
Do you have any advice for developers looking to use Rust for web applications?
john_doe 1 year ago next
My primary tip is to learn Rust's ownership model. It's somewhat difficult to grasp at first, but once you understand it, you'll find yourself writing safer, more efficient code. Also, familiarize yourself with the ecosystem's web frameworks and libraries, such as Rocket and Actix. Finally, Rust benefits from a strong FFI, making it easier to integrate with established web technologies, if needed.
mutator 1 year ago prev next
I really appreciate the deeply technical explanation of your implementation. I'm wondering, how do you plan to keep your stack up-to-date with a language like Rust, which has a slower release cadence?
john_doe 1 year ago next
That's a great question. We've considered tools such as `rustup` and its `channels` to stay current with new releases. However, because Rust doesn't have a built-in package manager, it's, unfortunately, as challenging as other languages like C++ and Java. We try our best to follow official blogs and announcements in the Rust community, so we're aware of breaking changes.
parallax 1 year ago prev next
I'm concerned about how this implementation may handle massive documents and many simultaneous users. What are some bottlenecks you foresee when scaling, and how might they be solved?
john_doe 1 year ago next
Great question! We've covered some performance considerations earlier, but scaling to handle massive documents, especially, requires planning. We believe that long-term caching would significantly help with loading and rendering large files. Additionally, we anticipate potential synchronization challenges as the number of users grows, and that will likely demand a decentralized system or specialized load balancing. These are areas we're still actively exploring.