10 ms·

Maybe the numbers didn't look very good and they thought it was better to leave them out

ksec 2y ago
But then what is the point telling us they are doing it with WASM now? Seems more like a KPI - Work Progress report. Edit: In a different blog post : https://workspace.google.com/blog/sheets/new-innovations-in-google-sheets 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.
- cm2187 2y ago
  I don't know if native excel should be the benchmark. It seems to me that it has been ever slower over excel versions.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    One trouble with Excel is that it does an awful lot of different things but doesn’t do them well. If you try do use it to do what Pandas does it is shocking how small of a data file will break it. 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.
    - wood-porch 2y ago
      Google sheets does do decimal math so I'm not sure what you mean
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        It doesn’t use ordinary floats?
        wood-porch 2y ago
        Unless my test methodology was flawed: Displays 0.3: "=0.1+0.2" Displays 3E+79: "=(0.1+0.2)*1e80"
        csande17 2y ago
        Try "=((0.1+0.2)-0.3)*1e80" -- your test can be fooled by pretty standard rounding for display.
        wood-porch 2y ago
        Oops -- nice, thank you! Sorry, guess I was mistaken
        mkl 2y ago
        That could be just the way it's displaying, e.g. to 14sf or something. If you try adding a million 0.1s and use a formula to compare to 100,000, that might tell you (with floats I got 100000.00000133288). This question suggests it uses floats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yields-infinitesimal-number-as-remainder-of-an-integer-whole-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yi...
    - emeril 2y ago
      maybe try rowzero.io as at least a remotely calculated alternative? 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
- azakai 2y ago
  The two posts make the most sense together, yeah. 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.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Well done on the accomplishment -- no small feat to improve runtime 50% in a mature codebase. 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?
    - azakai 2y ago
      This post might help: https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting 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 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/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...
  - lukan 2y ago
    Oh, you were involved as well. Well then, no wonder things worked out! (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.
    - azakai 2y ago
      Oh, thanks! Yeah, I was involved here on the toolchain side. We did a lot of work on the Binaryen optimizer for WasmGC.
- michaelothomas 2y ago
  I don't know absolute values but Excel still has several advantages which make it faster: - Excel is written in C++ and compiled natively which will be a bit faster than Java running on the JVM. And Java running as WasmGC is about 2x slower than Java on the JVM. - Sheets is limited to 4GB of RAM by the browser, Excel isn't. - C++ can do shared memory multi-threading, WasmGC cannot.
  - tomComb 2y ago
    Not sure why you’re comparing the c++ Excel to the browser version of sheets. It would make more sense to compare the native version of Excel to the native versions of sheets, ie. android iOS and chromeOS, and the browser sheets to the browser excel.
    - adrianmonk 2y ago
      Because they're replying to someone who wondered about the performance "compared to Native Microsoft Excel". I'll add that browser Google Sheets and native Microsoft Excel are the fastest versions available (of each product).
      - tomComb 2y ago
        Why do you suggest that the web version of sheets is faster than the swift or Java versions? I haven’t tried them, and certainly haven’t benchmarked them, but I would imagine they’re faster.
    - ehsankia 2y ago
      I don't think there is a native desktop version of sheets? On ChromeOS, it's running the web version. But yes I'd be curious to see how the web version of Excel does it.
      - tomComb 2y ago
        There is a version of sheets in both App Stores and I believe you can run the android version on chrome OS

ksec 2y ago

But then what is the point telling us they are doing it with WASM now? Seems more like a KPI - Work Progress report. Edit: In a different blog post : https://workspace.google.com/blog/sheets/new-innovations-in-google-sheets 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.

cm2187 2y ago
I don't know if native excel should be the benchmark. It seems to me that it has been ever slower over excel versions.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  One trouble with Excel is that it does an awful lot of different things but doesn’t do them well. If you try do use it to do what Pandas does it is shocking how small of a data file will break it. 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.
  - wood-porch 2y ago
    Google sheets does do decimal math so I'm not sure what you mean
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      It doesn’t use ordinary floats?
      - wood-porch 2y ago
        Unless my test methodology was flawed: Displays 0.3: "=0.1+0.2" Displays 3E+79: "=(0.1+0.2)*1e80"
        csande17 2y ago
        Try "=((0.1+0.2)-0.3)*1e80" -- your test can be fooled by pretty standard rounding for display.
        wood-porch 2y ago
        Oops -- nice, thank you! Sorry, guess I was mistaken
        mkl 2y ago
        That could be just the way it's displaying, e.g. to 14sf or something. If you try adding a million 0.1s and use a formula to compare to 100,000, that might tell you (with floats I got 100000.00000133288). This question suggests it uses floats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yields-infinitesimal-number-as-remainder-of-an-integer-whole-number https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74542790/google-sheet-yi...
  - emeril 2y ago
    maybe try rowzero.io as at least a remotely calculated alternative? 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
azakai 2y ago
The two posts make the most sense together, yeah. 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.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Well done on the accomplishment -- no small feat to improve runtime 50% in a mature codebase. 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?
  - azakai 2y ago
    This post might help: https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting 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 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/Overview.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...
- lukan 2y ago
  Oh, you were involved as well. Well then, no wonder things worked out! (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.
  - azakai 2y ago
    Oh, thanks! Yeah, I was involved here on the toolchain side. We did a lot of work on the Binaryen optimizer for WasmGC.
michaelothomas 2y ago
I don't know absolute values but Excel still has several advantages which make it faster: - Excel is written in C++ and compiled natively which will be a bit faster than Java running on the JVM. And Java running as WasmGC is about 2x slower than Java on the JVM. - Sheets is limited to 4GB of RAM by the browser, Excel isn't. - C++ can do shared memory multi-threading, WasmGC cannot.
- tomComb 2y ago
  Not sure why you’re comparing the c++ Excel to the browser version of sheets. It would make more sense to compare the native version of Excel to the native versions of sheets, ie. android iOS and chromeOS, and the browser sheets to the browser excel.
  - adrianmonk 2y ago
    Because they're replying to someone who wondered about the performance "compared to Native Microsoft Excel". I'll add that browser Google Sheets and native Microsoft Excel are the fastest versions available (of each product).
    - tomComb 2y ago
      Why do you suggest that the web version of sheets is faster than the swift or Java versions? I haven’t tried them, and certainly haven’t benchmarked them, but I would imagine they’re faster.
  - ehsankia 2y ago
    I don't think there is a native desktop version of sheets? On ChromeOS, it's running the web version. But yes I'd be curious to see how the web version of Excel does it.
    - tomComb 2y ago
      There is a version of sheets in both App Stores and I believe you can run the android version on chrome OS