⚡ Introducing AQE — Atomic Quantum Engine

[willmartAQE]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

Hey everyone,

I'm excited to share something I've been building for a while: AQE (Atomic Quantum Engine), a high-performance CSS selector engine that takes a fundamentally different approach to DOM querying.

Instead of walking the DOM tree on every query, AQE projects every node into a 64-bit BigInt bitmask stored in a flat SharedArrayBuffer. Matching a selector becomes a bitwise AND — one integer comparison per node, no string parsing, no tree traversal.

On top of that, AQE Pro adds a dual Bloom bucket index that lets the background Worker skip entire 32-node chunks before any node-level comparison occurs. On a 20,000-node DOM, a selective query can resolve in under 0.4ms while the main thread stays completely unblocked.

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Two editions

AQE Light — free and open source

• Zero dependencies, no build step
• Synchronous, main-thread query via bitmask pre-filter + el.matches()
• Ideal for projects up to ~5,000 nodes
• Drop in a single file and go

AQE Pro — commercial

• Full off-thread scanning via Web Worker
• Dual Bloom bucket index (60–90% of buckets skipped on selective queries)
• SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics for zero-copy, race-condition-free memory access
• Live DOM observation via MutationObserver — buffer stays in sync automatically
• Concurrent async queries via unique queryId routing
• Spatial filtering: query by CSS selector AND viewport bounding box
• Scales to 50,000+ nodes with sub-millisecond response times

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Why not just use querySelectorAll?

querySelectorAll is excellent for occasional queries. AQE targets a different problem: high-frequency querying on large DOMs — virtual DOM diffing, design tools, live dashboards, component libraries that query hundreds of times per second. At that scale, the difference between 6ms and 0.3ms per query is the difference between a janky UI and a smooth one.

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Performance at a glance

Scenario	querySelectorAll	AQE Light	AQE Pro
Compound selector, 20k nodes	~4–8ms	~1–3ms	~0.1–0.4ms
100 concurrent queries, 20k nodes	~400–800ms	~150–300ms	~5–15ms
Spatial filter query	✗	✗	~0.05–0.2ms

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Supported selector syntax

Full coverage: tag, .class, #id, [attr=val] with all operators, :pseudo-class, ::pseudo-element, :not(), :is(), :has(), compound selectors, selector lists, and all combinators (>, +, ~, descendant).

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Get it

• 📄 README & docs: see this repository
• 🆓 AQE Light: available in this repo https://github.com/willmartAQE/AQE - MIT licensed
• 📧 Questions / enterprise licensing: williammartin.aqe@gmail.com

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I'd love to hear your feedback — whether it's edge cases in the selector parser, ideas for the spatial API, or questions about the SharedArrayBuffer setup. Drop a comment below or open an issue.

Thanks for reading. 🚀

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