[HN Gopher] CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadshee...
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       CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadsheet compiler
        
       Author : grungleshnorts
       Score  : 200 points
       Date   : 2024-01-05 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (belkadan.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (belkadan.com)
        
       | ljlolel wrote:
       | Love this as a low level visual debugging tool.
       | 
       | What if you can compile down to Excellvm? Can see issues at a
       | glance.
        
       | hashtag-til wrote:
       | Looking forward to the excel MLIR dialect. /s
        
       | eigenket wrote:
       | This is impressively cursed.
        
         | jaystraw wrote:
         | i now have a word to describe why i found this hilarious, thank
         | you
        
         | flir wrote:
         | That's exactly how I felt when I first heard about node.js, and
         | look what happened there.
        
       | c0balt wrote:
       | Oh, so this is what they meant with "being proficient in Excel"
       | /s
       | 
       | Though seriously quite a funny idea and I would love to see more
       | of these projects. An excel to wasm compiler or similar might
       | also be interesting.
        
       | HPsquared wrote:
       | Can it self-host?
        
       | netsec_burn wrote:
       | Well good thing Google doesn't count Google Sheets toward the
       | overall Drive storage.
        
       | Devasta wrote:
       | For too long, web browsers have dominated the market for
       | applications that are consumed by document readers, glad to see
       | some competition at last.
        
         | bbor wrote:
         | Interesting dichotomy! Ultimately I see the browser as a
         | document viewer. As someone who's trying to kill desktop apps
         | once and for all with the progressive web app revolution, I'm
         | very curious: what excites you about getting this in excel
         | instead of, idk, Excel.com? Do you think there's a fundamental
         | performance difference that matters?
        
           | RugnirViking wrote:
           | Yes. There is an immediate tactile sense that everything is
           | slower. This matters hugely to me because I regularly work
           | with sheets that are already large and slow
        
             | bbor wrote:
             | Gotcha, thanks for the quick reply! I totally agree for
             | google sheets in particular; honestly it slows
             | unexpectedly, handling certain huge sheets fine and then
             | dying at the sight of a couple thousand lines of
             | conditional formatting.
             | 
             | That said, I was always hoping there was some option out
             | there proving it to be possible! Here's to hoping it comes
             | soon if not, because I personally don't understand why a
             | spreadsheet _needs_ OS calls to function performantly.
             | 
             | For simpler apps, I have hope for "local first web
             | development", which seeks to move everything possible onto
             | the client device and then do asynchronous syncing - thus
             | handling the latency issue you mentioned. I'm guessing this
             | is basically already what Google sheets does
        
           | aftbit wrote:
           | I like having the application on my machine so I can use it
           | without permission or contact with the remote server, at
           | least after licensing is completed. I find myself working
           | offline more than you might imagine, and I also run desktop
           | software that is 10 to 20 years old pretty regularly. I
           | shudder to imagine what will happen to today's generation of
           | SaaS software once it is past commercial viability. Probably
           | it will be lost forever, unlike stuff from the 90s and 00s
           | that still runs fine.
        
       | robertknight wrote:
       | Related to this, I recommend Felienne Hermans' talks on Excel as
       | a functional programming language -
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw.
        
         | kzrdude wrote:
         | Not related to this, excel has just introduced Python support
         | and it's a pretty wild take on it all. You can have Python code
         | in any cell, and all the cells share a namespace for their
         | variables. GL HF everyone.
         | 
         | Ideal: Functional. Reality: Stateful spaghetti
        
           | plagiarist wrote:
           | I was so hyped when I found out spreadsheets had map/reduce,
           | I thought we were entering a functional programming
           | renaissance. This is appalling news that we are in fact
           | entering a hotter trashfire than ever before.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | Yes. They've completely flubbed python-in-excel already.
        
         | chrisweekly wrote:
         | Reminds me of MobX intro docs describing its observables in
         | terms of spreadsheet cells with computed values.
        
       | kzrdude wrote:
       | How is the iteration triggered?
        
         | hahn-kev wrote:
         | I don't think it is really, it must result in a single value,
         | like an aggregate, at least that's what I understood from
         | reading it.
        
       | actionfromafar wrote:
       | I want to see an Excel frontend to LLVM.
        
       | keithalewis wrote:
       | Wait'l people figure out Excel is thread safe and has no memory
       | leaks. Every one will be rewriting things in that instead of
       | Rust!
        
         | mccrory wrote:
         | Too bad it has tons of memory leaks if you run even simple VBA
         | using excel.
        
       | yujian wrote:
       | missed the chance to call this "CeLLVM"
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-05 23:01 UTC)