CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadsheet compiler

https://belkadan.com/blog/2023/12/CellLVM/

by grungleshnorts • 3 years ago

226 27 3 years ago

belkadan.com

ljlolel• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Looking forward to the excel MLIR dialect. /s

eigenket• 3 years ago

This is impressively cursed.

jaystraw• 3 years ago

i now have a word to describe why i found this hilarious, thank you

flir• 3 years ago

That's exactly how I felt when I first heard about node.js, and look what happened there.

c0balt• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Can it self-host?

netsec_burn• 3 years ago

Well good thing Google doesn't count Google Sheets toward the overall Drive storage.

Devasta• 3 years ago

For too long, web browsers have dominated the market for applications that are consumed by document readers, glad to see some competition at last.

bbor2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

aftbit• 3 years ago

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.

delta_p_delta_x• 3 years ago

As someone who’s trying to kill desktop apps once and for all with the progressive web app revolution

Yikes, I hope not. Powerful, native desktop apps are what got me interested in computing, not the Web.

Browsers are a good use-case for kiosk-based computing, I don't disagree, and there are many use-cases for effectively booting directly into a browser (i.e. ChromeOS) but when it comes down to wanting pedal to the metal, I always reach for native technologies. It provides both a better developer and end-user experience.

For instance, you asked what a spreadsheet program might need the OS for. Many spreadsheets are used as databases (even if they shouldn't). A high-speed asynchronous I/O API is pretty critical for responsiveness, without going through the interpreter and GC of a browser.

cyanydeez2• 3 years ago

we should be friends

robertknight• 3 years ago

Related to this, I recommend Felienne Hermans' talks on Excel as a functional programming language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw.

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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__• 3 years ago

Yes. They've completely flubbed python-in-excel already.

chrisweekly• 3 years ago

Reminds me of MobX intro docs describing its observables in terms of spreadsheet cells with computed values.

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

How is the iteration triggered?

hahn-kev• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

I want to see an Excel frontend to LLVM.

keithalewis• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Too bad it has tons of memory leaks if you run even simple VBA using excel.

yujian• 3 years ago

missed the chance to call this "CeLLVM"

CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadsheet compiler

Related Stories