Excel-Virtual-Machine: C Compiler which targets Excel

&gt; A2 acting as standard input, and cell B2 acting as standard output.<p>This made me literally laugh out loud for way too long. This is the dumbest and most awesome thing I&#x27;ve seen in a while. I love it.<p>Also doesn&#x27;t seem to have been modified for 5 years.

<i>&quot;Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn&#x27;t stop to think if they should.&quot;</i>

This is quite clever, and probably a joke that I&#x27;m not getting, but the Excel C SDK lets you call C&#x2F;C++ from Excel and vice versa. This is one of my bread and butter tools, and I like nice tools, so I wrote a C++ wrapper around the SDK. It also lets you embed C++ objects in Excel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xlladdins&#x2F;xll" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;xlladdins&#x2F;xll</a>

The &quot;blog post&quot;[0] is an actual demo. Click &quot;Run as spreadsheet&quot;. This is amazing for learning.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrthefakeperson.github.io&#x2F;Excel-Virtual-Machine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrthefakeperson.github.io&#x2F;Excel-Virtual-Machine&#x2F;</a>

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm.

Why? Because we can that&#x27;s why!

&gt; The compiled Excel file can be executed by triggering iterative calculation (pressing F9 repeatedly)<p>I know very little Excel, but can’t you create a loop with it?

This is disgusting. I love it.

There was a time when we used Excel Services in SharePoint to meet some of our business user needs. I wouldn’t use Excel again, but back then it seemed to be a good trade-off between time-to-market and usability (meaning performance for most of the time).<p>Anyhow, we use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;handsontable&#x2F;hyperformula" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;handsontable&#x2F;hyperformula</a> to run calculations in our other components these days.

Ironically, 97% of the code is written in F#.

Then we need a powerpoint virtual machine[1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.andrew.cmu.edu&#x2F;user&#x2F;twildenh&#x2F;PowerPointTM&#x2F;Paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.andrew.cmu.edu&#x2F;user&#x2F;twildenh&#x2F;PowerPointTM&#x2F;Paper....</a>

It never ceases to amaze me how Wall Street thinks every pipeline needs to flow through Excel. I couldn&#x27;t believe it 20 years ago and it&#x27;s even harder to believe today.

See also: brainf*k in Google Spreadsheet<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14703098" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14703098</a>

cool

The always required: &quot;Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.&quot;