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> I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler. Excuse me WHAT? Is there a list of goofy MS decisions somewhere?

sph 4y ago
TFA explains why this goofy decision was one of the reasons behind Excel's success, and it is the point of the entire article.
- lionkor 4y ago
  You can build excel by relying only on standard ISO/ANSI C features. The fact that they felt like they were better than using a fully standard compliant compiler says more about their lack of competence than anything else. You could learn to properly use ANSI C, or you could write your own compiler instead for some subset of C and pretend like youre smart for it. It would make sense why MSVC has pretty much no C support, and why so many MS products are so uniquely bad, instead of being bad in the same ways (uniformly)
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    Remember though, Excel development started in the mid 80s, before ANSI C was even standardized.
    - lionkor 4y ago
      Yeah nevermind - I can't edit my comment now, but I was clearly not thinking about this.
  - jdsully 4y ago
    > You can build excel by relying only on standard ISO/ANSI C features. The fact that they felt like they were better than using a fully standard compliant compiler says more about their lack of competence than anything else. One of the worst things about the modern internet is people can be so rude and disrespectful to people they've never met for decisions they know nothing about. The custom compiler was used in the 80s and early 90s for P-Code and was a way of dealing with the perceived proliferation of multiple CPU architectures, as well as producing significantly more dense code. This mattered a lot back then.
fsckboy 4y ago
Excel didn't really have its own C-compiler. Microsoft at that time had two (and a half) groups, Systems which included MS-DOS (and "languages"), and Applications who were developing "office" applications. The apps group had its own compiler known as "cs" and organized around interpreted p-code which is smaller. This compiler was written for Multiplan and Word before Excel was even conceived. MS-DOS was written in assembly, and very stripped down and small, but office apps needed to be somewhat fatter with luxurious features so memory was an issue. Microsoft was working on a C compiler but wasn't selling it as a product (although, did they license Lattice C for awhile?) Ultimately, the cs compiler was added to Microsoft's C compiler as a p-code option. Ultimately ultimately people stopped caring about small memory and the utility of pcode went away.

sph 4y ago

TFA explains why this goofy decision was one of the reasons behind Excel's success, and it is the point of the entire article.

lionkor 4y ago
You can build excel by relying only on standard ISO/ANSI C features. The fact that they felt like they were better than using a fully standard compliant compiler says more about their lack of competence than anything else. You could learn to properly use ANSI C, or you could write your own compiler instead for some subset of C and pretend like youre smart for it. It would make sense why MSVC has pretty much no C support, and why so many MS products are so uniquely bad, instead of being bad in the same ways (uniformly)
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  Remember though, Excel development started in the mid 80s, before ANSI C was even standardized.
  - lionkor 4y ago
    Yeah nevermind - I can't edit my comment now, but I was clearly not thinking about this.
- jdsully 4y ago
  > You can build excel by relying only on standard ISO/ANSI C features. The fact that they felt like they were better than using a fully standard compliant compiler says more about their lack of competence than anything else. One of the worst things about the modern internet is people can be so rude and disrespectful to people they've never met for decisions they know nothing about. The custom compiler was used in the 80s and early 90s for P-Code and was a way of dealing with the perceived proliferation of multiple CPU architectures, as well as producing significantly more dense code. This mattered a lot back then.

fsckboy 4y ago

Excel didn't really have its own C-compiler. Microsoft at that time had two (and a half) groups, Systems which included MS-DOS (and "languages"), and Applications who were developing "office" applications. The apps group had its own compiler known as "cs" and organized around interpreted p-code which is smaller. This compiler was written for Multiplan and Word before Excel was even conceived. MS-DOS was written in assembly, and very stripped down and small, but office apps needed to be somewhat fatter with luxurious features so memory was an issue. Microsoft was working on a C compiler but wasn't selling it as a product (although, did they license Lattice C for awhile?) Ultimately, the cs compiler was added to Microsoft's C compiler as a p-code option. Ultimately ultimately people stopped caring about small memory and the utility of pcode went away.