LibreOffice merges initial support for compilation to WebAssembly
LibreOffice has incorporated initial support for EmScripten-based cross-compilation and compilation to WebAssembly (WASM) for execution in a browser or possibly a portable way to run on the desktop, such as Wasmer. At present, some of the WASM commits have been merged into LibreOffice. This document outlines the involved WASM construction steps. In addition, a simple demo application was added, which eventually became a Mandelbrot containing the Qt5 toolbox.
In fact, the EmScripten toolchain has been used to port LibreOffice to WebAssembly for some time. This Wiki page lists some of their work. The relevant developers hope that it can make LibreOffice play a role in more browser-based deployments. The previous LibreOffice Web project did not achieve fruitful results, and it also undertook a huge maintenance burden.
The merger of the WASM code this week takes place before LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha 1 is scheduled to be released next week. The feature freeze and branch of LibreOffice 7.2 is scheduled to begin in early June, followed by the release of the Beta version. The stable version of LibreOffice 7.2 will be released at the end of August.
LibreOffice 7.2 also has many improvements to its Writer word processor. Thanks to improved font caching, text rendering is faster. In addition, LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet performance has also been improved, and the import/export filter continues to be optimized.
