Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 459 posts

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#311

Post by chengmau »

I know the architecture too good, more than I need as I was leaving MS recently. This tweet is not likely to happen. Talking about desktop apps, this doesn't make any sense. Office apps have millions of lines in code and many years of lost knowledge between the classes. Just too many screens, checkboxes and features. A complete bloatware. Buy MS doesn't take any feature off the app- if you have 1B users, most likely that any minor feature cut will hurt some of them, hundred of thousand of them, and they are probably paying, not free riders. Any new office version only hides features, letting this small users group to get them back, never deleting lines of code. MS doesn't want to get billions fined as happend when they moved to docx/pptx/xlsx and didn't support backwards.

Talking about the online versions of office, it is a mess. For Word and PPT they tried to replicate the desktop to the web, rewriting the code, so their current online versions are already using (mostly) new code dedicated for the web. Saying that, they also have a huge number of legacy components and features that they need to support for backward compatibility.So for word and ppt this is a mix in code, not a total re-write. They also have a substantial subset of the features that appear only in their older desktop brothers. Even the PMs don't dare to dream on features parity between the versions.

Excel is a different world and a big-big elephant that won't likely be rewritten any years soon. Think of a code that is maintained over 30 years. Literally, developers are still maintaining code written in the 90s. Trying to bring Excel to the online world made MS create an architecture of html frontend which communicates with a dll session behind the scenes. As weird as it sounds, this dll lives as long as the browser has the spreadsheet opened. Think of it as MS raising VM for every excel file that is opened over the internet. While this is not very cost effective (saying the least) and not very performance friendly (hey ma! I made an understatement) this allowed them to move forward with Excel online very quickly by having a UI communicating with the bloatware dll that runs on the background in Azure. Summarizing Excel, it probably won't also be rewritten in js.

So this PM might be talking about the new apps - Teams or flow or something similar. Not the office cash cows. Personally I really hope he is talking about Skype which became a total garbage in the past versions.

Anyone from Google here? I'm looking for a job :-) ping me (chengmau) in the blind app

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#313

Post by imtringued »

Dinux wrote: post #26
Maarten88 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand they are using React Native. I too find it hard to believe they would drop the native Windows and OSX versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, for apps written in React Native. But Microsoft has offered many surprises lately...

We're talking 50M SLOC and 20+ years of development for native platforms. I highly doubt that they will let that go in favor of an JS app.

If they can charge for a subscription they will let all of that go in favor of an JS app.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#314

Post by seanmcdirmid »

coryfklein wrote: post #278
shrumm wrote: post #14

Surprised they didn’t opt for Typescript. Then again, it’s a tweet - looking forward to a longer blog post with technical details when they’re willing to talk about it more.

Oh god please I hope they have. In my experience, dynamically typed scripting languages struggle to keep up with the rigorous structure enforced by statically typed languages once the project gets large enough. Yes, in theory you _can_ write big projects well in dynamically typed languages, but in practice you get a mess of undocumented interfaces and unit tests that don't quite catch the plethora of errors not prese…

Typescript doesn’t have much Hindley Milner in it since it has way too much sub typing (even if it’s all structural).

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#315

Post by fokinsean »

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.

Integrating blockchain into MS paint is the final prophecy before the Microsoftcalypse

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#316

Post by ghostwreck »

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)

JavaScript compiled to native code[1] so perhaps not because of that!

[1] https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006761134395834368

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#317

Post by cm2187 »

contextfree wrote: post #276
artmageddon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this thread, with all the Javascript talk, makes me feel like I should be scared of continuing to be a C# developer..

Office client never used .net or C# to begin with

Actually at one point they went very close to replace VBA with .net. It was called VSTA and meant to be a mini visual studio in office apps. I believe one of the office apps shipped with it in Office 2007, then they killed it.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#318

Post by privacypoller »

chandmk wrote: post #283

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 wo…

When you have multiple accounts it's even worse - especially if you've got a work account with domain authentication, a private one with 2-factor, a sub-account email under another...

I'm usually pretty savvy about typing information into a rando web form, but with windows logins it's a major chore to figure out what exactly I'm looking at.

I hope they staff up to meet the 18-month rewrite cycle for modern JS apps. I'll stick with my 2003 version on the desktop for now.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#319

Post by cvwright »

TensorMetric wrote: post #243
cududa wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong https://twitter.com/thelarkinn/status/1006761134395834368?s=...

Not wrong, see the Windows 10 OneNote app for example, which already uses Typescript on WinRT/UWP. An Electron target will only be for legacy platforms, like Windows 7 and 8. Also see https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/office-365/161295/microsoft-r...

It's funny that the "new, simplified ribbon" in Thurott's screenshot looks a lot like the old interface in Office 2000.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#320

Post by LarryDarrell »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #310
morrbo wrote: post #142

Why not C#? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity to feed some of the APIs undoubtedly created for this into the new .net core stuff. I guess i'll just keep dreaming of the day when i can reliably convert a docx into a pdf without using office interop.

C# doesn’t easily compile to the web. This is why they are rewriting office 365 in the first place right?

WebAssembly?
Post reply on HN