react-tabulator VS ag-Grid

react-tabluator is an open source table library based on the Tabulator library, a powerful JavaScript data grid and table library. The package allows you to manage complex tabular data within your React application, leveraging the extensive features provided by Tabular.

We use Tabulator for a similar use case at my job, it has a virtual DOM to support thousands of rows pretty well. It's not React based, it's a vanilla JS library. There is a React wrapper here but I don't have experience with that.

In this post I’ll show you how, using the AG Grid component and Ably Spaces, you can create a React application that allows users to see not only who else is currently viewing the grid, but using a Flowbite Avatar Stack component, what row each user currently has selected.

something like ag-grid? https://github.com/ag-grid/ag-grid

I personally use https://www.ag-grid.com/ for all my data grid needs. It has a free community version (that should get you covered imo) as well as a paid one with advanced features.

To be fair, in any GUI toolkit, the "table" is abolutely the most complex general purpose widget. People really under estimate the difficult of an efficient implementation. Qt spents YEARS improving their QTableWidget class. The implementation is mind-bogglingly complex. I am sure many very smart summer interns (PhDs!) have tried to tweak that class to squeeze every bit of performance possible. The table class in GTK+ and MSFT DotNet's WPF are equally, freakishly insane.

Consider this idea: Most people who use a table class in a GUI framework assume it is essentially infinitely scalable (myself included!). I am talking about millions of rows or thousands of columns with all kinds of silly widgets injected into individual cells. It is a crazy hard computer science problem to solve. I would not doubt there are many PhD thesises written on the topic of fast, scalable table widgets.

Beyond desktop GUI toolkits, people have tried to do the same in a browser (HTML/CSS/JS). Have you seen AG-Grid? Woah, it is unbelievable how much goddamn data you can squeeze into that widget. Most Wall Streets web-based trading apps use it one way or another. It's just so hard to beat. Ref: https://www.ag-grid.com/ There must be 1,000 person years of optimisation sunk into that implementation.