Thorsten Behrens, one of the leaders of the LibreOffice graphic subsystem development team, has published a demonstration version of the LibreOffice office suite compiled into intermediate WebAssembly code and capable of running in a web browser (around 300 MB of data is loaded to the user's system). The Emscripten compiler is used to convert into WebAssembly, while the VCL backend (Visual Class Library) is organized based on a modified Qt5 framework. Specific fixes for WebAssembly support are developed in the main LibreOffice repository.
Unlike the LibreOffice Online edition, the WebAssembly-based build allows the entire office suite to run in the browser, meaning all code is executed on the client side, while LibreOffice Online performs and processes all user actions on the server. server, while only the interface is streamed to the client's browser. Moving most of LibreOffice to the browser will facilitate the creation of a cloud edition for collaborative work, reducing the load on servers, minimizing differences from the desktop version of LibreOffice, simplifying scaling, enabling offline operation, and allowing P2P interactions between users along with end-to-end data encryption on the user's side. Plans also include creating a widget based on LibreOffice for integrating a full text editor into webpages.
Source: opennet.ru
