Hacker News Reader

Oh, just what Office needed: a rewrite that will almost certainly not even approach feature parity

Actually, I think the opposite is true. Instead of seeing new desktop versions without feature parity, we will finally see the iOS/Android/MacOS/Web versions of the Office Suite get feature parity with the Win32 versions because they will all be built from the same codebase.

I know that it's common for rewrites to not approach feature parity, but I think Microsoft is aware of how much people rely on Excel and Word and will make feature parity a high priority because of that.

I find it hard to believe they will ever duplicate all the edge cases. I mean in some cases it's literally impossible because IIRC VBA can actually hook into Win32 functions (I mean I guess you might argue that feature is a bad idea)

If VBA can hook into WIN32 functions, why do you think a VBA parser/interpreter written in JavaScript using a native module that exposes the same WIN32 functions couldn’t do the same

I suppose that's true; I just imagined it was going to be sandboxed to be browser-compatible.

Par for the course with everything else they've rewritten then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com