Introduce Snapshotting to Optimize CRDT DAG Compaction and Traversal

[mgazza]

Hi, I've been playing with this library and it's great. However, I'm not happy about the DAG's continuous growth, and I'd like to help.

The current implementation of go-ds-crdt maintains a DAG structure to represent state changes in a datastore. While effective, this approach has limitations:

Performance Overhead: Traversing and replaying large DAGs to compute the current state becomes costly as the DAG grows. Garbage Collection: Stale or redundant nodes in the DAG are retained unnecessarily, increasing storage requirements. Recovery Times: Rebuilding state after a crash or restart is slow, as it requires replaying the full DAG history. Snapshotting introduces a mechanism to address these issues. By creating a periodic snapshot of the DAG, we can:

Compact the state into a "base snapshot." Limit traversal to only the most recent nodes. Facilitate faster recovery by replaying transactions only since the last snapshot.

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[cryi]

Hi, I see that this was already implemented in #288 but closed shortly after opening. @mgazza is it still in works?

[mgazza]

Hi @cryi yes, we implemented this, but then just really pushed the issue down - you end up needing a Merkle DAG of snapshots and that sort of perpetuated the problem. We're currently experimenting with a slightly different mechanism which does away with the need for snapshots, and that is the CL-SET. The repo is private right now, but we will OS it as soon as we can. We plan to make the interface compatible with go-ds-crdt.