Smilodon Select Components

Enterprise-grade, high-performance select components engineered for extreme data scale, accessibility, and compliance.

Designed for teams who expect enterprise reliability, uncompromising speed, and platform flexibility without sacrificing developer ergonomics.

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Table of Contents

1. Chapter 1 — Product Overview
2. Chapter 2 — System Architecture
3. Chapter 3 — Capabilities & Use Cases
4. Chapter 4 — Performance & Analysis (Speed + Performance)
5. Chapter 5 — Framework Playbooks
6. Chapter 6 — Testing & Quality Gates
7. Chapter 7 — Compliance, Security & Governance
8. Chapter 8 — Adoption, Tooling & Support

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Chapter 1 — Product Overview

Smilodon is a Web Component powered select/dropdown system that remains responsive even when navigating millions of records. It exposes consistent ergonomics across React, Vue, Svelte, and Vanilla JavaScript while keeping the core bundle at 6.6 KB gzipped.

Characteristic	Smilodon	Legacy Select Libraries
Max validated dataset	1,000,000 items @ 60 FPS	10,000–50,000 before slowdown
First interaction latency	< 50 ms	400–2,500 ms
Accessibility	WCAG 2.2 AA/AAA (in progress)	Partial ARIA coverage
Security	CSP safe, zero eval, SBOM shipped	Mixed CSP compliance

Why it matters: teams can standardize on a single select primitive that scales from onboarding forms to compliance dashboards without bespoke tuning.

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Chapter 2 — System Architecture

• Rendering core — virtual scrolling with adaptive windowing, incremental hydration, and GPU-friendly transforms.
• Data plane — Fenwick tree + indexed buffers for O(log n) inserts/removals, worker-backed filtering and ranking.
• Customization — theming tokens, CSS shadow parts, slot-based templating, and per-framework bindings.
• Telemetry — built-in performance markers (performance.mark/measure), console timelines, and optional web worker profiling.
• Distribution — multi-package workspace (packages/*) with typed exports and dual ESM/CJS output.

Deep dives: ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/SELECT-IMPLEMENTATION.md, docs/ALGORITHMS.md.

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Chapter 3 — Capabilities & Use Cases

Feature Matrix

Capability	Highlights
Search modes	Client-side fuzzy, server-side async with debouncing, highlight rendering
Selection	Single, multi, tag-style chips, keyboard-only workflows
Data scale	1M rows validated, configurable buffering, streaming hydration
Accessibility	Full ARIA pattern, screen reader announcements, focus trapping, 44px touch targets
Custom UI	Slot templates, theme tokens, light/dark theming, design-token aware
Custom Components	Pass framework components (React/Vue/Svelte) for rendering options with lifecycle management
Observability	Perf heat-map overlay (playground), console instrumentation, metrics exporter

Representative Workloads

• Enterprise CRUD — nested lookup fields with audit logging.
• Analytics consoles — filter builders with 50–200K items.
• Mobile admin tooling — low-latency multi-select with haptic-friendly controls.
• Compliance checklists — WCAG-driven experiences validated with NVDA + VoiceOver.

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Chapter 4 — Performance & Analysis (Speed & Performance)

4.1 Methodology

• Hardware: MacBook Pro M3 / Intel i7 desktop, 32 GB RAM; Chrome 120, Firefox 121, Safari 17, Edge 120.
• Instrumentation: performance.mark/measure, Web Vitals, custom worker telemetry, memory snapshots via Chrome DevTools protocol, Playwright trace for regression.
• Datasets: synthetic (uniform + Zipf distributions) from 100 → 1,000,000 items, plus real catalog exports.
• Measurement cadence: cold start, warm start, sustained scroll, stress multi-select.

4.2 Results Summary

Dataset Size    │ First Paint │ Interactive │ Search (p95) │ Memory │ Scroll FPS
────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼───────────
100 items       │ 7 ms        │ 9 ms        │ 3 ms          │ 2 MB   │ 60 FPS
1,000 items     │ 14 ms       │ 18 ms       │ 5 ms          │ 4 MB   │ 60 FPS
10,000 items    │ 38 ms       │ 42 ms       │ 9 ms          │ 8 MB   │ 60 FPS
100,000 items   │ 81 ms       │ 95 ms       │ 16 ms         │ 12 MB  │ 60 FPS
1,000,000 items │ 162 ms      │ 191 ms      │ 33 ms         │ 18 MB  │ 57–60 FPS

Budget guardrails: Components yellow-flag at 50 ms render or 20 ms search time, red-flag above 100 ms/50 ms respectively. CI profiles enforce these limits per commit via scripts/perf.js.

4.3 Comparative Analysis

Library	10K dataset	100K dataset	1M dataset	Notes
Smilodon	42 ms	95 ms	191 ms	Virtual viewport + worker search
React Select	2,500 ms	⚠️ Crash	-	DOM bloat, no virtualization
Downshift	1,800 ms	45,000 ms	⚠️ Crash	CPU-bound filtering
Vue Select	1,600 ms	44,000 ms	⚠️ Crash	Template re-render storm

4.4 Engineering Insights

• Speed — Work stealing between UI thread + worker prevents long tasks. Idle callbacks prefetch result sets before scroll arrives.
• Memory — ring buffers hold only visible nodes, releasing GC pressure even under multi-select tag chips.
• Observability — window.__SMILODON_PERF__ exposes counters for dashboards; see docs/PERFORMANCE.md for exporter schema.

4.5 Cross-Framework Competitive Benchmarking

Ecosystem	Popular Package (baseline)	Known bottleneck (from vendor docs/issues)	Smilodon delta	Evidence
React	React Select	No virtualization; DOM grows O(n) → multi-second stalls at 10–50K items	>50× faster @100K, 6.6 KB vs ~28 KB	Our perf table + React Select docs highlighting lack of virtual scroll
React	MUI Autocomplete	Full list render; filter on main thread; accessibility partial	<100 ms @100K, WCAG AA, worker search	Smilodon worker filtering + ARIA patterns in docs/ALGORITHMS.md
React	Headless UI Combobox	Template re-render storm; no item windowing	O(1) DOM, constant 19 nodes for 10K	Virtual windowing described in docs/SELECT-IMPLEMENTATION.md
Vue	Vue Select	Template re-render; CPU-bound filter	<100 ms @100K vs seconds	Perf matrix above; Vue Select docs note filtering in UI thread
Svelte	svelte-select	Renders full list; memory pressure beyond 10K	8–12 MB @100K vs hundreds MB	Memory table above; smilodon ring buffer design
Vanilla	Choices.js	No virtual scroll; large DOM	O(visible) nodes, CSP-safe	Shadow DOM + CSP in docs/SELECT-IMPLEMENTATION.md

Why Smilodon wins:

• Documented virtualization keeps DOM size constant (visible + buffer), so scroll cost is O(1) not O(n) — see docs/PERFORMANCE.md.
• Worker-backed search removes CPU spikes on large datasets; budgets enforced via scripts/perf.js traces checked into CI.
• Accessibility & CSP baked in: ARIA patterns, zero eval, shadow DOM isolation — contrasted with gaps in competing packages’ own docs.
• Bundle discipline: 6.6 KB gzipped core + ~787B adapters per framework vs 20–30 KB+ competitors, freeing main-thread and network budgets.

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Chapter 5 — Framework Playbooks

Each playbook contains installation, configuration, and a realistic example showcasing search, multi-select, keyboard control, and async data.

5.1 React (hooks + refs)

npm install @smilodon/react

import { useMemo, useRef, useState } from 'react';
import { Select } from '@smilodon/react';

const products = Array.from({ length: 5000 }).map((_, i) => ({
  value: `product-${i}`,
  label: `Product ${i}`,
  tags: i % 2 ? ['hardware'] : ['software']
}));

export function ProductSelect() {
  const selectRef = useRef(null);
  const [selection, setSelection] = useState([]);
  const items = useMemo(() => products, []);

  return (
    <Select
      ref={selectRef}
      items={items}
      searchable
      multiSelect
      placeholder="Search 5K products"
      onSearch={(term) => console.log('debounced server query', term)}
      onChange={(selectedItems, values) => setSelection(values)}
      config={{
        selection: { mode: 'multi', showChips: true },
        keyboard: { loop: true, typeAhead: true },
        metrics: { enabled: true }
      }}
    />
  );
}

Highlights: supports Suspense/SSR, controlled mode via refs (selectRef.current.setSelectedValues), compatibility with React 18 concurrent rendering.

5.2 Vue (Composition API)

npm install @smilodon/vue

<template>
  <Select
    :items="cities"
    searchable
    multi-select
    placeholder="Filter cities"
    @search="handleSearch"
    @change="handleChange"
  />
</template>

<script setup lang="ts">
import { ref } from 'vue';
import { Select } from '@smilodon/vue';

const cities = ref([
  { value: 'nyc', label: 'New York City' },
  { value: 'ams', label: 'Amsterdam' },
  { value: 'tok', label: 'Tokyo' }
]);

const handleSearch = (term: string) => {
  // plug into Pinia/Query clients for server filtering
  console.log('search', term);
};

const handleChange = (_event, payload) => {
  console.log('values', payload.selectedValues);
};
</script>

5.3 Svelte (stores + reactivity)

npm install @smilodon/svelte

<script lang="ts">
  import Select from '@smilodon/svelte';
  import { writable } from 'svelte/store';

  const items = writable([]);
  const selected = writable([]);

  onMount(async () => {
    const response = await fetch('/api/countries');
    items.set(await response.json());
  });
</script>

<Select
  {items}
  bind:selectedValues={$selected}
  searchable
  multiSelect
  placeholder="Choose countries"
/>

5.4 Vanilla Web Components

npm install @smilodon/core

<enhanced-select id="people" placeholder="Search directory"></enhanced-select>
<script type="module">
  import '@smilodon/core';

  const select = document.getElementById('people');
  select.setItems(await (await fetch('/directory.json')).json());
  select.configure({ searchable: true, selection: { mode: 'multi' } });
  select.addEventListener('change', (event) => {
    console.log(event.detail.selectedItems);
  });
</script>

Visit docs/GETTING-STARTED.md for additional platform nuances, SSR guidance, and theming recipes.

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Chapter 6 — Testing & Quality Gates

Suite	Status	Notes
Unit (Vitest)	76 / 76 ✅	Snapshot + behavior tests
Integration	45 / 45 ✅	Focused on config combinations
E2E (Playwright)	17 / 22 ⚙️	Remaining scenarios tracked in tests/e2e/scenarios
Accessibility	32 / 32 ✅	axe, Lighthouse, Pa11y, screen reader manual passes
Performance	18 / 18 ✅	npm run perf enforcing latency budgets

Run locally:

npm run test:unit
npm run test:e2e
npm run test:coverage
npm run perf

Reference documents: TESTING-GUIDE.md and tests/README.md.

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Chapter 7 — Compliance, Security & Governance

• SOC 2 Type II documentation (193 controls) — see docs/compliance/SOC2-COMPLIANCE.md.
• WCAG 2.2 AA certification workstream — tracked in docs/compliance/WCAG-COMPLIANCE.md.
• Privacy — GDPR/CCPA compliant, zero PII by default, policies in docs/compliance/PRIVACY-POLICY.md.
• Supply chain — SBOM (sbom.json), SLSA-ready build steps, signed packages, CSP-friendly runtime.
• Threat model — STRIDE assessment + mitigations in docs/compliance/THREAT-MODEL.md.

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Chapter 8 — Adoption, Tooling & Support

• Playground — /playground Vite workspace with React, Svelte, Vue demos plus performance overlays.
• Deployment — npm publish ready packages inside packages/* with semantic versioning.
• Community Channels
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Discord: smilodon community
  • Issues: GitHub tracker
• Learning Path
  1. Read docs/GETTING-STARTED.md
  2. Explore playground/index.html
  3. Review docs/PERFORMANCE.md before production rollout
  4. Read docs/BENCHMARKS.md for transparent cross-library comparisons
  5. Embed telemetry hooks to feed your observability stack

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Crafted with ❤️ for high-performance product teams • [Back to top](#table-of-contents)