An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust

dataflow

What is Word used for (or who uses it) nowadays? I don't remember the last time I typed anything on it.

anilgulecha

Storytold apps are a gift, and are setting the precedent for AI apps. Everyone was wondering about the relevance of open source in post AI era, and here we have it: a magnitude more ambitious ecosystem. While Bun proved at-scale rewrite, these are proving huge at-scale re-dos of the entire software ecosystem. I suspect 24 months from now the landscape of daily software is going to be vastly changed.

jubilee33

This makes me so happy. Thank you!

lovich

So were just done with the original definition of "clean-room implementation" right? Cause you cant use AI that you cant guarantee wasnt trained on this implementation, and call it a clean-room implementation. At least not if you are going to be honest, but I guess that makes sense given how much these AI companies and their leaders lie.

pmkary

Wow. This is insane.

airstrike

Rich text editing and egui. Interesting choice

tombert

Damn! I was in the process of doing this after I heard about Artcraft. They beat me to it!

umvi

These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.

aprilthird2021

I don't get why this is so impressive? You have libreoffice as well, but this project, like that one, will find that maintenance and resolving user issues and providing cloud features are the hardest and most valuable parts of document editing software. Not just having something that works like other open source document editors that already exist. Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.

sbarre

Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true? They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper. I hope I'm wrong!

Waterluvian

How does one decide on the layer that each thing lives at architecture wise? Is it just that everything is one layer above whatever subsystems it depends on?

iamgopal

AutoDesk is next ?

Rover222

You'd rewrite the Bible in Rust at this point

lr0

Has anyone of the people spamming these apps by storytold on HN actually tried any of them? I know that any new software can have bugs, but the ones here are really not acceptable for a release, let alone labeling it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone who might have used any of the originals, or at least can assess basic software qualities. I have tried some of them and really everything is buggy, a lot of options and buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the clones of Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as of writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy than my experience with photocraft, changing a text to a headline made it just crash on my M4 MacBook, after making it VERY slow and unresponsive for 3 minutes. It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with. I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like they are really what they claim to be. Genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.

espeed

Has anyone compiled a list of best practices for using AI agents to develop large software projects in Rust? Types help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806799 Agent memory helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948328 Storytold's projects include some: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/AGENTS.md More?

wackget

All the apps claim to run in the browser via WASM but no links are provided. Are there any live demos of these hosted somewhere?

titzer

Why make a clone when you can redo the whole dang UI? Sure we'd like WYSIWYG, but I am absolutely convinced now in my 34th year of computer use that I don't want a GUI with a bunch of toolbars and dropdown menus that is laid out by decades of cruft accumulation.

cobychapple

I see that in addition to the Adobe suite apps last week, they've also now done implementations of excel/spreadsheet ( https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft ), powerpoint/presentation ( https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft ), and also AutoCAD/3D modeling ( https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft ) as well. What a time to be alive.

maidaman

Is it easier to make all these apps from scratch or use AI to supercharge an existing open source alternative?