Building a high performance spreadsheet in the browser

Hi HN, I’m one of the founders here at Equals.

We've been building Equals – a next gen spreadsheet with data connections – for a few years now. Making Equals fast is a constant stream of work and we've had to solve some pretty interesting problems, we thought it'd be fun to start sharing some of our learnings here.

Our most recent bottleneck was our formats system. The hard thing about formats in a spreadsheet is you can apply them to hundreds of thousands or millions of cells at once. Formats aren't just a presentation concern, they are also the spreadsheet's type system and thus affect the speed of all calculations. The linked post here is by Mike on our team describing the computer science behind how we finally made formats fast.

We shared one of our previous launches on Hacker News [1] and so thought this might be of interest too. Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback.

Ben

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132