Maybe the numbers didn't look very good and they thought it was better to leave them out
Edit: In a different blog post :
https://workspace.google.com/blog/sheets/new-innovations-in-...
"Building on improvements like smooth scrolling and expanded cell limits in Sheets, today we’re announcing that we’ve doubled the speed of calculation in Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers,"...
I dont use Google Sheet but I wonder how far apart are their new implementation compared to Native Microsoft Excel.
The idea of incremental calculation of formulas that don’t need to be put in a particular order is still genius but the grid is so Apple ][. Maybe the world doesn’t know it because it spurned XBRL but accounting is fundamentally hyper dimensional (sales of items > $100 in the afternoon on the third week of February in stores in neighborhoods that have > 20% black people broken down but department…) not 2-d or 3-d.
Having the wrong data structures is another form of “garbage in garbage out”. I have though many times about Excel-killers, trouble is they have to be something new, different and probably specialized, people know how to get answers with Excel even if they are wrong, plus Excel is bundled with the less offensive Word and Powerpoint so a lot of people are paying for it either way.
Personally I want a spreadsheet that does decimal math even if there is no hardware support except on mainframes: I think a lot of people see 0.1 + 0.2 |= 0.3 and decide computers aren’t for them.
Displays 0.3:
"=0.1+0.2"
Displays 3E+79:
"=(0.1+0.2)*1e80"
This question suggests it uses floats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yi...
I live in excel sadly and it's all been downhill since excel 2003
as for better math calcs, yeah excel isn't perfect for true accuracy of decimal math but that rarely matters in 99.99% of use cases - if you need really accurate math you use R/Python/etc.
if you need something for the masses, visicalc/lotus/excel is the solution
I was involved in this work (happy to answer any questions). Overall we started from a large slowdown compared to JS, worked hard, and ended up with a large speedup over JS of around 2x. So right now it is a big improvement over JS.
That improvement required work across the codebase, the toolchain, and the VM. Most of it is not specific to Java and also helps other WasmGC projects too (like Dart and Kotlin). We are also working on further improvements right now that should make things even faster.
I'm interested more in learning how to work within wasmgc. Do you have any resources you'd point to for someone looking to pick it up?
https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting
See in particular the "getting started" section near the end:
https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting#getting-started
At a lower level the overview in the WasmGC github repo is very good:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...
(I remember you from your work with asm and emscripten and the various ports you did, which I played around with)
No specific question(right now), I just want to say, I admire your work.
Yeah, I was involved here on the toolchain side. We did a lot of work on the Binaryen optimizer for WasmGC.
1. How is the landscape of wasmGC browser support? Given it's relatively new is it OK to use this and ship production apps now? How does sheets handle older/unsupported browsers?
2. In Google IO the Workspace team mentioned they'd leverage Kotlin Multiplatform to achieve use cases like this. I see Sheet's using the in-house J2CL compiler but is there cases where KMM is used to target WASM - in sheets or docs? What are your thoughts?
https://webassembly.org/features/
Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers) and Firefox have had WasmGC enabled for a few releases now. But Safari doesn't yet last I heard.
Sheets can serve a JS version to browsers without WasmGC, since they can compile the same code to either JS or Wasm.
About Kotlin, I know they have a working WasmGC toolchain that works very well, so personally I think it is a good option in general. But I don't know offhand about current users or plans.
I'll add that browser Google Sheets and native Microsoft Excel are the fastest versions available (of each product).
But yes I'd be curious to see how the web version of Excel does it.
While you technically can run it on ChromeOS through the Android emulation, it's still a mobile app and you're far better off running the web version.
Yet excel still limits the number of rows to 65536 or so.
Even a million seems embarrassingly puny these days, considering a webpage can have a million checkboxes rendered in only a moment.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Any serious Excel user has a PC.
One of the few places remaining where Windows > Mac
And Microsoft would rather push everyone to the 365 Web subscription, than keeping selling native Excel, which by the way, nowadays uses plenty of React Native code instead of pure C++, exactly because of code portability to Office 365.