April 23rd, 2012, 3:30 pm
CuchulainnThanks for your interest.We do not use ATL. The system runs the C processing stages as separate processes, via a shell interface. This is not inefficient, as there are few invocations, and the overhead head of such a scheme is proportionally minimal. The architecture also provides a good degree of protection for Excel, should the external program fail: such failures won?t crash Excel.There?s also the portability aspect: COM is a Windows thing, whereas the C-code is potentially useable with many OSs. Early in the project, we had developed a command line interface (using delimited files instead of Excel tabs) that could work in Linux. Once the source is released, I am hoping that we can refresh and extend that aspect of the project.One frustration for me was lack of easy Mac compatibility. Because we used Excel and ANSI C, I thought this wouldn't be a problem, but because the system performs a background compile and link, it becomes necessary for the Mac user to have XCode. This seriously increases the complexity of the installation. Regards,Marc