Excel Custom Functions in Zig
Details
- External ID
- 45978400
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Excel Custom Functions in Zig
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Nov. 19, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.0982532751091703
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
A Zig package for implementing Excel custom functions against the ancient C SDK.This exists because I wanted to learn about Zig's C interop and comptime to see if it was possible to make the Excel C SDK slightly nicer to work with.It's just a demo, I wouldn't use it for anything important, but I learnt a lot doing it. There is also a demo repo: https://github.com/AlexJReid/zigxll-standalone
Enrichment
- Theme
- custom packaging, printing, and gifting
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- excel custom functions written in zig
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Implementing Excel C XLL add-in interfaces in Zig requires deep systems programming, low-level Win32 ABI knowledge, and compile-time C-interop expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this requires expert-level understanding of the 1990s Excel C SDK XLL architecture, memory-managed XLOPER12 structures, and Microsoft calling conventions. A developer must write custom Zig comptime code to generate type-safe wrapper bindings for C function export definitions. It demands specialized systems C/Zig systems expertise and debugging binary crashes inside host processes like Microsoft Excel.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: xllify, Excel-DNA
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 23 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 24 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
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- ExcelManager · github · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Zig parser in ~70 lines of JavaScript · hn · 2026-01-17 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- ZigFormer · hn · 2025-11-27 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Excel Formula Translator · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- SheetTricks · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- 20+ excel shortcuts · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- ALT · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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