Engineering LetX: The Philosophy Behind 99.9% Reliable Compiles
Building a text editor is hard. Building a collaborative text editor that compiles scientific code in real-time is a nightmare. Here is why Shahriar Labs chose to tackle it.
Why Collaborative LaTeX Needed Rethinking
Most collaborative tools manage "conflicts" (when two people edit the same line) by locking the file. We hated that. It breaks flow.
Ashraful Kabir Alif, our Co-founder & CTO, pushed for a Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) approach. This allows LetX to merge edits mathematically, ensuring no work is ever lost, even on bad university Wi-Fi.
Design Constraints and Trade-offs
- Latency vs. Consistency: We prioritize local speed. You type instantly; we sync eventually (within milliseconds).
- Browser vs. Server: We offload syntax highlighting to the browser (using Rust/WASM) to save server resources for the heavy lifting: LaTeX compilation.
Reliability in Academic Tools
When a student hits "Compile" 5 minutes before a deadline, it must work. We treat compilation jobs like financial transactions—they are queued, monitored, and retried automatically.
FAQ
Q: Is it open source?
The core parser components are open-sourced on our GitHub.
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