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France's homegrown open source online office suite

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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#81
post #72
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.

What an asinine comment, Django is good enough for several billion dollar companies. It's probably good enough to use in a government capacity too.

It really depends on how it’s used. I love Django in certain specific situations. You know that saying though about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail…

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#82
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.

I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.

Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#83
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.

I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.

[flagged]

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#84
post #58
post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.

Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#85
post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#86
post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.

My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#87
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you use instead?

Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.

That article is seemingly all about the perf of the complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in the browser, nothing to do with what’s happening on the server.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.

[flagged]

82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the contribution of an individual.

Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.

I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#89
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.

I’m my opinion, you have to be kinda masochist to choose C++ for this. Web development is hard in C++. But thanks for answering honestly.

In my opinion one inherent property of languages is how large the largest program is that can be written in those languages. There's languages that work well for short programs. Bash, perl are examples on one end of the spectrum. Then you have things like lisp and Python where the largest programs are a lot larger already, but still hit obvious limits. And then you have the languages that support really large codebases. Java, C++ are ones currently in use.

There's new languages where it's a bit of an open question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and python. And Rust ... well ... good question.

An office suite is a gigantic application, which will need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If you want it working on the web, I'd propose something like C++ and WASM.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#90

Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.

Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.
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