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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice definitely feels sluggish.

I give it a pass because it's doing complicated things, it's free software and I also temper my expectations slightly because it's a Java GUI application (and I expect those to be slow).

I would certainly not expect it to be more performant than Office '97.

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LibreOffice is derived from OpenOffice.org which is derived from StarOffice which predates Java. When it was acquired by Sun and open-sourced, they added some optional components implemented in Java, but the core application is not a Java application. The GUI is not Swing but their own custom GUI framework (not based on Java).

Libre/OpenOffice is a C++ application which uses an homegrown cross-platform GUI toolkit. There were only some minor components written in Java (like mail merge), and I believe LibreOffice has replaced some of them with native code.

I can't find references now, but Gnome or Ubuntu had a phase where they were booting the desktop with under 128MB of RAM.

It would be great if LibreOffice had a spurt of speed-ups. Kind what the browser wars also competed fiercely about.

LibreOffice may be slow, but is UI is not build in Java, 90+% of LibreOffice is built on C++.

Being written in Java there is no surprise here.

If you want LibreOffice with less Java, you should try Collabora Office. https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-av... (I'm not affiliated)

Java is optional, not used for any of the core office functionality. You can build and use LibreOffice completely without Java.

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