logoalt Hacker News

scosman • today at 7:56 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I’m vibecoding an excel in rust just to see if it can be done and what are the limits.

https://github.com/scosman/freecell

So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.

I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.

It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already an engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good. If someone invested into something like this full-time for 6 months it's hard to imagine what you'd need excel for.


Replies

quesera • today at 8:23 PM

I'm not normally one to quibble about software naming collisions, and I have literally never run MS Windows on any hardware ever in my life.

But this collision seems inauspicious.

➕ show 1 reply
NetMageSCW • today at 8:28 PM

If you don’t support PowerQuery (which I don’t see mentioned for IronCalc even as a future goal) you are long way from Excel for many.