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The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

simonwillison.net

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Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#3
I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#5
post #3

I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.

Not that easy. Also, they have "priorities." Although their priorities are different than the users'.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#7

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.

> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency

What's the alternative library you see?

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#9
post #3

I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.

What % of time, for a an average session, do you think is app overhead vs waiting for tokens? And there's your answer for why it's not a priority.
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