Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

Re:Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript by Someone on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @01:05PM (#17304968)

Why at all? I would expect, long term, the ideal solution for a “run in browser” solution would be WebAssembly, possibly with JavaScript glue to the DOM. If so, they probably can keep large paths of their existing code base.

Also, I expect the existing code base isn’t small, so a rewrite won’t be ready soon.

That makes cross-compiling from whatever they have now to WebAssembly or JavaScript seem even better options.

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Re:Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript by tannhaeuser on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @01:26PM (#17305196)

Well TFA is about a big-time rewrite of Office into JavaScript, so at least MS doesn't appear to see any perspective in WASM.

Considering they are uniquely positioned to make it happen given their C# buy-in and probably more than just a bit of existing software to leverage, I'd say this is as strong a signal of non-endorsement as it gets.

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Re:Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript by chc on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @01:50PM (#17305429)

I don't think we can read that much into it. The tweet says the project is nearly finished, and this doesn't sound like a small effort — so it would have started either before WASM was really a thing or when WASM was still a very risky bet. I mean, I don't imagine they'll be jumping to WASM, but I don't think we can read it as "they're deliberately not endorsing WASM" so much as "WASM is still quite new."

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