Looking for beta testers for AQE Light — a CSS selector engine built on BigInt bitmasks. Top 10 contributors get AQE Pro for free.

William Martin — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:33:58 +0000

I've been building AQE (Atomic Quantum Engine), a DOM selector engine that replaces tree traversal with flat bitmask operations. Instead of walking the DOM on every query, each node gets a 64-bit BigInt mask at sync time. Matching becomes a single integer AND.

AQE Light is the free, open-source version — zero dependencies, MIT license, on npm now:

npm install atomic-quantum-engine

I'm looking for developers who are willing to:

Install it and try it in a real project or side project
Run the interactive benchmark and share your results: https://willmartaqe.github.io/AQE/
Open issues for bugs, edge cases, or selectors that don't behave correctly
Give honest feedback on the API, the documentation, or the README
Star the repo if you find it useful: https://github.com/willmartAQE/AQE

The 10 most active contributors — measured by issues opened, pull requests, feedback quality, and benchmark results shared — will receive AQE Pro for free.

AQE Pro adds off-thread Web Worker scanning, a dual Bloom bucket index that skips 60-90% of nodes before any comparison, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics for zero-copy thread access, live DOM observation, concurrent async queries, and spatial filtering. It's designed for large SPAs, design tools, and dashboards with 5,000+ nodes under high query frequency.

No commitment required — even running the benchmark and dropping a comment counts. I'm genuinely looking for edge cases and real-world feedback, not just stars.

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/atomic-quantum-engine
GitHub: https://github.com/willmartAQE/AQE
Benchmark: https://willmartaqe.github.io/AQE/
Questions: williammartin.aqe@gmail.com

I built a CSS selector engine that uses BigInt bitmasks and a dual Bloom bucket index instead of DOM traversal — AQE is now on npm

William Martin — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:45:44 +0000

I've been frustrated with querySelectorAll performance in high-frequency scenarios for a while. On large DOMs (10k+ nodes) with 50–100 queries/second — think virtual DOM diffing, live dashboards, design tools — it becomes a real bottleneck.

So I built AQE (Atomic Quantum Engine): a CSS selector engine that replaces tree traversal with flat, memory-mapped bitwise operations.

HOW IT WORKS

Every DOM node gets a 64-bit BigInt bitmask. Each CSS token (tag, .class, #id, [attr], pseudo-class) maps to a unique bit position. Matching a selector becomes a single integer AND:

(nodeMask & targetMask) === targetMask

No string parsing. No tree climbing. No attribute iteration at query time.

AQE LIGHT — free, MIT, on npm now

Synchronous bitmask pre-filter + el.matches() for complex selectors

Zero dependencies, single file, works everywhere

~3–5× faster than querySelectorAll on warm queries

Best for up to ~5,000 nodes

npm install atomic-quantum-engine

BENCHMARKS — 20,000-node DOM, .active[data-ready]

Warm query: querySelectorAll ~4–8ms / AQE Light ~1–3ms / AQE Pro ~0.1–0.4ms 100 concurrent queries: querySelectorAll ~400–800ms / AQE Light ~150–300ms / AQE Pro ~5–15ms 50k node DOM: querySelectorAll ~10–20ms / AQE Light ~8–15ms / AQE Pro ~0.5–1.5ms

Run the benchmarks yourself in the browser: https://willmartaqe.github.io/AQE/

WHEN NOT TO USE IT

If your DOM has fewer than ~1,000 nodes or you query infrequently, native APIs are faster with zero setup. AQE is for measured bottlenecks at scale.

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/atomic-quantum-engine
GitHub (Light): https://github.com/willmartAQE/AQE
Questions: williammartin.aqe@gmail.com

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the Bloom index implementation, or the SharedArrayBuffer setup. Would love feedback from anyone building tools where selector performance actually matters.

Forem: William Martin

Looking for beta testers for AQE Light — a CSS selector engine built on BigInt bitmasks. Top 10 contributors get AQE Pro for free.

I built a CSS selector engine that uses BigInt bitmasks and a dual Bloom bucket index instead of DOM traversal — AQE is now on npm