Collaboration & CRDT (WASM)

Overview

Real-time collaboration needs compact update messages, deterministic merge, and often compatibility with existing Yjs providers. Rust implementations can sit in WASM next to your app, while awareness/cursors stay in JS.

Editor-specific CRDT design is also covered from a product-neutral angle in Editor → CRDT operations.

Yrs & Yjs interop

The y-crdt ecosystem provides Rust types (Yrs) and WASM bindings so you can produce/consume updates compatible with Yjs wire format—useful when the rest of your stack expects Yjs.

• Keep network codecs and merge in WASM if you need predictable performance or shared code with native clients.
• Keep UI binding (mapping CRDT to editor ops) in JS if you already use ProseMirror/Lexical/Slate adapters.

Editor host in JS

The WASM module rarely replaces the whole editor UX: it’s a collaboration engine or transform worker. Selection, IME, and toolbar still follow web patterns described in other Wasm guides.

Snapshots vs streams

Bootstrapping collaborators usually needs an initial snapshot plus a stream of updates. Decide where snapshots are generated (Rust vs JS) and how large they are over the WASM boundary—same concerns as JS ↔ WASM boundary.

More reading

• yrs on docs.rs
• y-crdt on GitHub
• Yjs project site