XLIDE: VBA without excel

39 points by sts153 3 hours ago | 6 comments

stymaar 1 hour ago |

Very cool in theory. Unfortunately it's just 12klocs of a vibe-coded week-end project.

Edit: it's actually 50klocs since the pyOpenVBA dependency is from the same author and has been made the week-end before.

airstrike 13 minutes ago | |

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

leshenka 1 hour ago |

Wonder how extensively VBA is used in today's Excel. I know that macros are considered dangerous but would love to know if there are exceptions for that rule.

On the other hand I wonder why aren't they run in such a sandbox where the most destructive action they can do is to wipe the sheets.

stymaar 1 hour ago | |

The world lives on Excel macros. The amount of “shadow it” where the business logic allowing big businesses to run is encoded is unfathomable.

qsort 40 minutes ago | |

I'm not at liberty to talk more about the details, but last year I worked on a project to modernize a process that critically relied on a VBA macro to handle billions (yes, with a B).

> they run in such a sandbox

What makes them interesting is that they can talk with the outside world: API calls, databases, the terminal named after a former Democratic primary candidate...

2Gkashmiri 1 hour ago | |

https://www.incometax.gov.in/iec/foportal/downloads/income-t...

You need a genuine licensed excel to run the file and prepare returns. Thankfully you can file same returns online on the portal for free so they get a safe pass that way.

_boffin_ 1 hour ago |

Gonna have some fun with this!