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alexjreidyesterday at 12:06 PM0 repliesview on HN

Delving deep into novel ways to extend Excel and make it more accessible. Perhaps different approach to copilot in that AI is only used during authoring, the yielded output being a standalone artifact.

The result is https://xllify.com

It embeds Luau which tames the very old school C SDK. This means that the same code can run as native add-ins on Windows (XLL) and the more modern-but-far-slower web engine, thanks to WASM. Luau is safe and fast.

The exact same bytecode runs in both styles of add-in. You get the performance of native with no extra work. Many approaches for writing custom functions are unacceptably slow, particularly when their inputs come from fast moving realtime data feeds.

I know Luau is perhaps a left-field choice. However, coupled with a coding assistant and bringing that lightweight conversational dev experience right into Excel (xllify Assistant is an add-in itself) this is perhaps less of a barrier.