OT Catchup (Replit)

When people code together on Replit, everyone's code needs to be in sync. You have to see the same code as I do even though we're typing on different computers. The challenge is making sure we don't end up with a jumbled mess of text while we type together. So in order to keep everyone's code in sync, Replit uses a method called Operational Transformations, or OT. Think about OT like this: when you type, you can either insert text, delete text, or move your cursor to a new position (this is called skip in OT land). These actions are called operations, and they transform your document! More concretely, you can look at an Operational Transformation as a function that takes in a document, a position within that document (like where your cursor is), and then either modifies the document at that position or skips to a new position. Back to keeping everyone in a multiplayer repl in sync. In the real world, we don't always work at the same time. Sometimes people leave then rejoin later, or lo

When people code together on Replit, everyone's code needs to be in sync. You have to see the same code as I do even though we're typing on different computers. The challenge is making sure we don't end up with a jumbled mess of text while we type together. So in order to keep everyone's code in sync, Replit uses a method called Operational Transformations, or OT. Think about OT like this: when you type, you can either insert text, delete text, or move your cursor to a new position (this is called skip in OT land). These actions are called operations, and they transform your document! More con