Imagining developer hell: C++ frontend with Excel-VBA backend web stack

Description

Four-panel meme using a scene from the TV show 'The Good Place.' Panel 1 (top-left) shows three people sitting outdoors at night on folding chairs; one asks, “What do you guys think The Bad Place is gonna be for you?”. Panel 2 (top-right) zooms on the male character who says, overlaid in white text on black box, “I am developing a website”. Panel 3 (bottom-left) continues his blank stare with caption “With C++ as frontend”. Panel 4 (bottom-right) shows him looking down in shame with caption “and excel and vba as backend”. The humor comes from the absurd, nightmarish tech stack choice: using C++ - a systems language - for browser UI and relying on Excel spreadsheets plus VBA macros as the server side, evoking architectural horror and technical debt nightmares for seasoned engineers

Common Tags

Backend TechHumor Frontend OverEngineering BadPractices SpaghettiCode

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick We told management it was “cloud-native”: C++ compiled to WebAssembly for the UI, headless Excel + VBA for the REST layer - because nothing scales like segmentation faults wrapped in circular references

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

We told management it was “cloud-native”: C++ compiled to WebAssembly for the UI, headless Excel + VBA for the REST layer - because nothing scales like segmentation faults wrapped in circular references
Anonymous

The real torture isn't maintaining a 20-year-old COBOL system - it's explaining to your CTO why the new microservice is written in VBA and the frontend bundler is actually just a makefile calling g++. At least in actual hell, the suffering makes sense
Anonymous

Hell isn't fire and brimstone; it's a 2GB .xlsm as the system of record and a segfault every time someone resizes the login form
Anonymous

Ah yes, the mythical tech stack that makes microservices look simple: C++ for DOM manipulation (because who needs garbage collection when you can have memory leaks in the browser?), Excel as your 'distributed database' (complete with .xlsx file locking for 'concurrency control'), and VBA macros as your REST API layer. It's the architectural decision that answers the question 'What if we took every wrong turn possible?' - truly the Bad Place of software engineering, where your CI/CD pipeline is literally someone clicking 'Enable Macros' and your scaling strategy is 'open more Excel windows.' The only thing missing is storing session state in Word documents
Anonymous

Nothing says enterprise like a full stack where the UI is C++ compiled to WASM, the service layer is a VBA macro scheduled by someone’s Outlook, and the consistency model is “who opened the spreadsheet last.”
Anonymous

Call it SOA: Spreadsheet-Oriented Architecture - C++ ‘frontend’ via WASM, pivot tables as the DB, and deploys blocked because someone left the XLSX open
Anonymous

C++ frontend segfaults your DOM, VBA backend VLOOKUPs into infinite recursion - hell's MVP for 'minimum viable product'
@QutePoet 4y

Is this really possible? I know it's possible to use PowerShell on the backend. But how to use Excel for such purpose?
1. @dsmagikswsa 4y
  
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/overview/excel-add-ins-reference-overview
  
  Deleted Account 4y
  
  Murder is never justifiable. But the exception proves the rule.
@Vlasoov 4y

But WASM is fast at least
1. @AlihatorU 4y
  
  +
@L2CacheGay 4y

Ngl that sounds like a fun challenge
@dsmagikswsa 4y

I think the intention is for some automation job instead of a DB.
@k_scranton 4y

still better then most webtech today tho
@nnmantgn 4y

This is disaster