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Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

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Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#281

Post by hellofunk »

_bxg1 wrote: post #228
Amezarak wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but I have never seen a fast Electron app. VS Code, Discord, Slack, etc., all have awful performance on older hardware where native programs like the full Visual Studio fly. It's my personal suspicion that people cheerleading JS all are working with fantastic developer hardware, where the performance impact is pretty muted.

Part of that is electron itself - I've heard it carries quite a bit of bloat - and part of that is the DOM. The DOM is very slow because of the guarantees it makes. You can edit any part of the HTML at any time - by hand or by API - and everything will resize and reflow implicitly. That's an incredibly powerful yet heavyweight feature. If they're using React Native, the only non-native thing is the raw JS logic itsel…

Updating the DOM in Electron is like updating the DOM on the web -- you can do it fast or you can do it old. Most Electron apps I've worked on or looked at the source are using things like React for the DOM, which is much faster than what you describe.

But if an app does it "old school" then it can definitely be very slow.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#282

Post by bitL »

dm319 wrote: post #208
F_r_k wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try plotting a 2x10000 range in libreoffice. Takes > 2 Mon just to render the graph. I'd be happy to provide the CSV to anyone interested

I've found the speed relates to the fileformat it is saved in. Might well still be slower, but in terms of speed ods > xls > xlsx for some reason.

I had it slow with plain CSV...

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#283

Post by chandmk »

As a side note, Microsoft login echo system sucks big time in the context of office. You have no idea which URL to use to login to office 365. Between login/logout/timeout/other office apps/personal accounts/business accounts/forgot password workflows browser redirects to various URLs at least a dozen times. And you keep seeing new URLs I am wondering how less tech savvy people are coping with their authentication workflow.

Depending on how you are authenticating you will see URLs with various words in them.

loginlive office.com outlook.office.com office365 outlook.com account.live products.office.com login.microsoftonline.com

and this list goes on and on... I am wondering if they made an announcement that they are fixing their messy authentication workflow instead spending resources in rewriting office in JavaScript, that would have gotten this much attention on hacker news.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#284

Post by jjeaff »

JCSato wrote: post #277
Melchizedek wrote: post #247

This guy confirms all my prejudices against JavaScript hipsters, ruining computing for everyone since 1995. The beard, the super-fun-happy demeanor instead of thoughtfulness and competence. Please Wasm, save us from this nightmare! And nuke the hipsters from orbit.

I know, right? Friendly, bearded, probably lives on the west coast and uses a Mac. Ugh. Can't wait for new technology to make these pathetic hipster devs hired by Microsoft for their abject lack of competence to go out of work.

Ya, we all know that the only truly competent developer is socially awkward and difficult to work with, unwilling to compromise and writes everything in assembly.

Sort of the developer version of "Nick Burns, Your company's computer guy"

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#285

Post by scrollaway »

JCSato wrote: post #277
Melchizedek wrote: post #247

This guy confirms all my prejudices against JavaScript hipsters, ruining computing for everyone since 1995. The beard, the super-fun-happy demeanor instead of thoughtfulness and competence. Please Wasm, save us from this nightmare! And nuke the hipsters from orbit.

I know, right? Friendly, bearded, probably lives on the west coast and uses a Mac. Ugh. Can't wait for new technology to make these pathetic hipster devs hired by Microsoft for their abject lack of competence to go out of work.

Sarcasm or not, how did you and the parent commenter write this and think "Hm, yeah, this is a high quality HN comment that is sure to elevate the discussion"?

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#287

Post by sp332 »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #268
DougN7 wrote: post #98

Ugggh :( I miss my old Outlook 2013. Outlook 2016 is so slow it can’t keep up wirh my typing. I thought it already was javascript. Guess it will be even slower still. Super! (not)

If I'm typing a sentence that I am very familiar with, I can get up to 95 WPM and Outlook 2016 has no problems keeping up. Perhaps it's your computer and not Outlook.

Yes but it's disappointing that it's slower than the 2013 version on the same hardware.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#288

Post by _bxg1 »

hellofunk wrote: post #281
_bxg1 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that is electron itself - I've heard it carries quite a bit of bloat - and part of that is the DOM. The DOM is very slow because of the guarantees it makes. You can edit any part of the HTML at any time - by hand or by API - and everything will resize and reflow implicitly. That's an incredibly powerful yet heavyweight feature. If they're using React Native, the only non-native thing is the raw JS logic itsel…

Updating the DOM in Electron is like updating the DOM on the web -- you can do it fast or you can do it old. Most Electron apps I've worked on or looked at the source are using things like React for the DOM, which is much faster than what you describe. But if an app does it "old school" then it can definitely be very slow.

Not true. The DOM in Electron is precisely the same as the one on the web, yes. But while React is faster than some of the other data-driven frameworks, it is not faster than "old school" DOM manipulation. The advantage of modern frameworks is developer experience, not performance. The DOM API is fundamentally slow because of how much work the browser has to do under the hood to respond to changes. Every framework, including React, goes through that API at the end of the day. This is why React has its own whole virtual DOM: so that it can touch the real one as little as possible.

My full-time job is writing tools in React that often have to handle datasets in the >10k items range.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#289

Post by dijit »

jjeaff wrote: post #284
JCSato wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, right? Friendly, bearded, probably lives on the west coast and uses a Mac. Ugh. Can't wait for new technology to make these pathetic hipster devs hired by Microsoft for their abject lack of competence to go out of work.

Ya, we all know that the only truly competent developer is socially awkward and difficult to work with, unwilling to compromise and writes everything in assembly. Sort of the developer version of "Nick Burns, Your company's computer guy"

You wrote this comment thinking that you're right; that the only thing that is not hipster is ASM and being socially awkward.

But you're both wrong, and I know it's obvious to everyone reading this comment but I'm spelling it out for you and OP specifically because nobody ever calls anyone out correctly.

There is a nuance to technology; it's not black and white and leaping to the extremes is not helping.

Is Javascript a "good" language by the classical definition of "good", well, no, not really.. but it's "good enough" for enough stuff and the ecosystem is the healthy part of it.

My point is (if I'm trying to make one), making things natively is certainly better for users RE: desktop software. So if you care more about your users time and their resources than you do your own development time then it makes sense to do it in a native language. (Not ASM, that's facetious)

The question invariably becomes: "Yeah, JS is /classically/ a bad language, mostly known by people who aren't formally qualified programmers who understand systems"

vs.

"Yeah, but can you imagine making something cross platform in C++ in 2018! talk about foot guns!"

There is middle ground here, but unless we can talk about it professionally and with charity to the "other side" then we'll never get anywhere.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#290

Post by sp332 »

ksec wrote: post #143

One Day Microsoft made VSCode and everyone loves them. The Second day Microsoft decide to buy GitHub and everyone were flocking off to Gitlab, everyone hates them. Now they are moving to the biblical end of computing era by making every Javascript. May be they will even Open Source the Windows Kernel some day.

They've released DOS http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-... Word 1.1 http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-word-for-wind... and WinFile (an old version but updated to run on Win10) https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile I'm sure they'll get to the kernel eventually!
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