zig

I’ve been tinkering with monoblok, a small partially NATS-compatible pub/sub daemon written in Zig. Two things make it interesting: a last-value cache on every subject, and a routing DSL called patchbay that lets you filter, smooth and re-publish messages at the broker, before any subscriber sees them. It is firmly an experimental toy at this point but the ideas are nice and the surface area is small enough to actually understand in an afternoon....

The Excel C SDK dates from the early 1990s. Memory management is manual, the type system is painful, and there’s almost no tooling. Despite all of this, it remains the only way to build add-ins that run truly in-process with Excel, supporting multi-threaded recalculation and the full breadth of what the host application can do. If you want the best possible performance, you need an XLL. But it’s a foot gun....