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strongpigeonyesterday at 11:02 PM1 replyview on HN

Oh wow, I used to work on Excel Add-Ins about 10 years ago. Even got a patent for it. I'd be curious to see how they implemented the calls.

We came up with what I still consider a pretty cool batch-rpc mechanism under the hood so that you wouldn't have to cross the process boundary on every OM calls (which is especially costly on Excel Web). I remember fighting so hard to have it be called `context.sync()` instead of `context.executeAsync()`...

That being said, done poorly it can be slow as the round-trip time on web can be on the order of seconds (at least back then).


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Acmeonyesterday at 11:16 PM

Do you mean that you worked on the Excel Add-Ins platform in Excel (and not on a specific Add-In)?

If you were working on the platform itself, then I would be interested in hearing your more detailed thoughts on the matters you mentioned (especially since I am developing an open source Excel Add-In Webcellar (https://github.com/Acmeon/Webcellar)).

What do you mean with a "OM" call? And why are they especially costly on Excel web (currently my add-in is only developed for desktop Excel, but I might consider adding support for Excel web in the future)?

In any case, `context.sync()` is much better than `context.executeAsync()`.

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