Excel Custom Functions in Zig
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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
HN · launched Nov 19, 2025 · 5 upvotes (top 90%) · 0 views
Niche: spreadsheet tools and extensions · 138 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -67% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 138 launches in spreadsheet tools and extensions →
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 : 46 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #46 of 47 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 14 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Excel Formula Translator · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- SheetDrill · ph · 2026-11-02 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Excelio · ph · 2026-11-07 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
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