xlwings VS node-bignum

Reading the headline, I initially thought that Microsoft bought the company behind XLWings [1], which also enables you to use Excel directly within Excel, even locally. Not affiliated in any kind to that company, just used it in the past.

[1] https://www.xlwings.org/

xlWings https://www.xlwings.org/

I'm trying to automate a report and I know xlwings does not support pivot tables and slicers, as it is essentially a pywin32 wrapper. You can directly reference the COM object using .api and constants

Also you can also use xlwings library to build an excel add-on to replace or even augment VBA.

You want xlwings (my preferred) or openpyxl

You could look at using Python from Excel using xlwings.

Xlwings is superior anyway.

xlwings - open source and free - https://www.xlwings.org/

> Many languages that are considered "precision" languages have some form of suffix to denote large/long/arbitrary-sized literals. (C# there's a big useful difference if a literal ends with `m` or `l`.)

The failure mode is significantly different when comparing JS to other mainstream languages. Most languages have a "checked" mode (either opt-in or mandatory) so that expressions like `4611686018427387904 + 4611686018427387904` can raise an error, whereas JS will just give you the wrong answer. Python is the most ergonomic for beginners or non-developers because the runtime will convert an integral type to an arbitrary precision integer on overflow.

Yes, there are alternative primitives that can be used, but you need to know they exist. We're talking about a tool that is explicitly designed for people who are not professional programmers, and JS's behavior here is surprising unless you understand the underlying data model. I would personally much rather give beginners a tool incorporating as few footguns as possible.

> JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)

Arbitrary precision arithmetic has been possible in JS since the language was invented, but it has always been a pain. The bignum NPM package[0] predates the BigInt numeric primitive by 9 years. The addition of `BigInt` to ES2020 was important for performance (since implementing an arithmetic primitive in JS makes calculations dog slow), but it didn't add any fundamental affordances to the language.

[0]: https://github.com/justmoon/node-bignum