reconcile-rs

Docs

This crate provides a key-data map structure HRTree that can be used together with the reconciliation Service. Different instances can talk together over UDP to efficiently reconcile their differences.

All the data is available locally on all instances, and the user can be notified of changes to the collection with an insertion hook.

The protocol allows finding a difference over millions of elements with a limited number of round-trips. It should also work well to populate an instance from scratch from other instances.

HRTree

The core of the protocol is made possible by the HRTree (Hash-Range Tree) data structure, which allows O(log(n)) access, insertion and removal, as well as O(log(n)) cumulated hash range-query. The latter property enables querying the cumulated (XORed) hash of all key-value pairs between two keys.

Although we did come we the idea independently, it exactly matches a paper published on Arxiv in February 2023: Range-Based Set Reconciliation, by Aljoscha Meyer

Service

The service exploits the properties of HRTree to conduct a binary-search-like search in the collections of the two instances. Once difference are found, the corresponding key-value pairs are exchanged and conflicts are resolved.