[throwaway2037]

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.