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Comment by davidkircos | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic (https://QuadraticHQ.com), an open-source spreadsheet application for engineers that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a result, you can pinch and zoom to navigate large data sets, and everything renders smoothly at 60fps.

Today, we launched real-time Multiplayer on Product Hunt!

Quadratic is built using WebGL and Rust WASM. We built our multiplayer service from scratch in Rust to handle large amounts of data smoothly. For smooth rendering of a large grid of data, cells and text are rendered using low-level WebGL for performance. If you are interested in the technical details, check us out on GitHub (https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic/)

What do you think? Can we make a spreadsheet that developers actually enjoy using?

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Cool! I’ve spent a lot of time building OT and CRDT based collaborative editing. What approach did you go with for quadratic? What were the pain points you had with existing systems that motivated you to write your own?

Was only a matter of time before I saw this question here and from you Joe! Only annoyed you beat me to it this time!

How do you handle server sync? What is the use case? You don't seem to be for application building, rather for doing analysis work (https://www.quadratichq.com/examples) where the main problem you solve is "No more squinting into a tiny terminal to see your data output"? So this is a data swiss army knife for developers, a dev sidecar if you will that attaches to your python REPL i guess. How do you make money?

The use case is doing analysis work as a team, with some engineers and some people only familiar with spreadsheets all being able to work together.

Quadratic is always free for individuals, and we will be paid for Teams, which will be shared folders that we are launching in a couple of weeks.

Congrats on releasing this!

I had a look at the server code. Is the idea that you will just vertically scale up the server to handle the load, or is there a mechanism for scaling out horizontally?

[1] https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic/blob/main/quadratic...

The `quadratic-multiplayer` service is designed to be scaled vertically. Once we hit that limit, we will need to come up with a way to route traffic to servers based on what file a user is accessing and what server is hosting that room.

Every other service can be scaled horizontally today. However, the Rust services are very efficient at processing traffic, and a single node can handle significant usage.

Gotcha, makes sense. I've heard stories of vertical scaling going a *long* way for multiplayer servers if they’re essentially relaying messages.

> we will need to come up with a way to route traffic to servers based on what file a user is accessing and what server is hosting that room

Shameless plug, but you might like https://plane.dev for this.

Plane.dev looks awesome. We will check it out!

Congrats on the launch! I was just looking at the Multiplayer PR earlier this week and was hoping it would be released soon. I’ve always been frustrated with Excel and you’ve built a product that I’ve legit dreamed of for years.

Thanks for building in CO!

Thank you! Yes, Quadratic was built out of frustration from existing spreadsheets.

If a spreadsheet was built today... it would support modern programming languages, be fast, multiplayer from day 1, have a great API, speak with databases natively,

This is what we are building!

It depends on the license and pricing.

I'd love to consider bringing to my org, but not if I don't have a true path. I won't even evaluate it unless I have a clear path to use.

Cool. Now please edit the title and remove the open-source label or make it open-source.

https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic/issues/824

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