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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

Do they mean that just the user interface is being rewritten in React/JavaScript or do they mean the entire application?

It is hard to believe that several million lines of Excel C/C++ code is being rewritten into JavaScript. It must be possible, but the cost and time to rewrite so much heavily optimized code seems prohibitive. And surely will run much slower than the existing Win32 version.

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only the frontend, there is a post on reddit in which one of the devs specifically said that all the backend is still in c++ and will remain that way

You got it. One of the engineers from the office product group chimed in and said as much. They are using react native for some UI components.

It's only about Office 365, the web application. It's written so in a first sentence of this article.

I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing were to be rewritten in JS/TS because their goal is to give you a full experience that competes with Google Docs by the sound of it. It also appears to me that just like they ditched updating Windows versions they're just going to have 'Office 365' aka it always updates, no more versions (externally).

Their online product is already on par or better than Google Docs, right now.

Only thing I can think is that they are trying to unify the UI code base across devices, and React is seemingly the winner there at this point.

Interesting that they also appear to be ditching the Ribbon for a simpler UI as well: https://www.engadget.com/amp/2018/06/13/microsoft-office-ui-...

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