Yet another Hacker News

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

90 points espeed 2 hours ago 79 comments

dataflow 1 hour ago | parent

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

ishtanbul 1 hour ago | parent

lawyers at a bare minimum

anilgulecha 1 hour ago | parent

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.

hootz 1 hour ago | parent

And they are already really useful, even in an extremely buggy alpha state. LightCraft is already working pretty well for a photography hobbyist like me. Can't wait to see the state of this software suite in 6 months.

chr15m 1 hour ago | parent

> extremely buggy alpha state

I'm curious about this part. As a user you're finding them extremely buggy - what kind of bugs are you seeing?

It sounds like you're expecting the bugs to be ironed out in six months. I guess I'm wondering if the same process that led to buggy software in the first place can actually be used to get rid of the bugs without creating more.

aprilthird2021 1 hour ago | parent

In the issues page of the repos you can see avg type of open source bugs. For the Word clone there is: spellcheck doesn't work, image embedding is broken, etc.

hootz 59 minutes ago | parent

Well, in the case of LightCraft, some basic things like processing raw photos. It seems to be struggling with processing them compared to older software, it's kinda slow and glitchy. But it's in a really early stage, support for the CR3 format (the one I need) was just added like 2 days ago.

antonvs 34 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think it’ll be “the same process”. Someone has to identify the bugs and instruct the LLM to fix them. I doubt that can be automated with GUI software as it stands today - there’ll be a lot of human involvement even if the LLM implements the fixes.

With a human in the loop, iterating on bugfixes can work. It’s just more human-labor-intensive than an initial implementation.

I suppose you could invite users to submit bug reports, give them some guidelines on how to write them, and then have an LLM monitor the bug reports and fix them. But then I think you’d be more likely to see the creation of more bugs, as you say.

hajile 1 hour ago | parent

Why not use Darktable?

_aavaa_ 1 hour ago | parent

Performance is bad and UI/UX is laughable.

d3Xt3r 58 minutes ago | parent

Why not use ART (RawTherapee fork)?

_aavaa_ 48 minutes ago | parent

See my previous comment.

sbarre 1 hour ago | parent

As a Lightroom user, I've tried _many_ times to use Darktable, and I've given up every time.

Like so many open source GUI projects, it's clear they have solid technical developers who are building good underlying tech, but they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like.

hootz 1 hour ago | parent

I do use it sometimes! But I dislike the UX. RawTherapee feels better, but it still feels weird compared to Lightroom. LightCraft is basically a Lightroom clone, so everything feels familiar and standard. The problem is that a bunch of stuff is still missing and/or buggy.

aprilthird2021 1 hour ago | parent

Let's add it to the list of predictions then. Wonder what people were predicting 2 years ago

infamouscow 1 hour ago | parent

Businesses that previously relied upon vendors are going to start hiring engineers to build their bespoke stack in-house.

This is software's radiology moment.

peri-cl 1 hour ago | parent

What happened in radiology?

aprilthird2021 1 hour ago | parent

No they won't

root_axis 55 minutes ago | parent

Why would they hire engineers for this?

usef- 1 hour ago | parent

Note that they're currently a buggy mess in my experience. That's not unusual for an alpha, but I'll personally wait to call them a gift until I see if the team is capable of polish+reliability. I do think their marketing is ahead of their product at the moment.

tyromaniac 1 hour ago | parent

> bun proved at-scale rewrite

Not so sure about that one

econgs321 1 hour ago | parent

Very nice!

jubilee33 1 hour ago | parent

This makes me so happy. Thank you!

lovich 1 hour ago | parent

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.

vhantz 1 hour ago | parent

Is Microsoft selling the code of its proprietary products for AI trainings? Definitely news to me

lovich 1 hour ago | parent

Can you tell me what the definition of "clean-room implementation" is?

And after that, can you tell me if you can call something a "clean-room implantation" without disclosing 100% of the training data used for the AI model making this supposedly "clean-room implementation"?

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t know about office, but there have been several major leaks of the Windows source code. It seems pretty reasonable to think that that leaked code has made it into Claude or Codex in some form.

jen20 1 hour ago | parent

How would the source for Microsoft Word be in the training data for (for example) Claude?

hajile 56 minutes ago | parent

How did those mathematician's data probably wind up in OpenAI's training data? They are willing to rip off Disney (one of the most litigious IP companies on the planet). There's no reason they wouldn't be willing to rip off the MS Word files uploaded by MS devs (and even less reason they won't steal your work too).

I really think the AI companies think there's no turning back on the infringement and they have to infringe in a "too big to fail" manner to the point where they can force an exception for AI not caring about the fallout for IP rights.

sbarre 1 hour ago | parent

I think the idea here is that all these reverse-engineering projects are _saying_ they're doing clean room implementations for quasi-legal protection.

So they are claiming to follow the legally protected "decompile -> write spec -> new code from spec only" process but they're likely skipping the "write spec" step, and hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.

lovich 58 minutes ago | parent

So like I said, they are lying.

antonvs 27 minutes ago | parent

> hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.

That would quickly fall apart in a courtroom, when they can’t produce the spec or show any evidence of development being done from the spec.

In any case, with LLMs I don’t see why that step would need to be skipped.

rosstex 1 hour ago | parent

I do wonder if some company with money to burn and their backs against the wall will find a sympathetic judge in the argument that precedent be damned, clean-room implementations made with AI cannot be considered clean-room. It's too little too late to stop the rapid advancement of open tech, but that hasn't stopped courts from trying to send a message.

LatticeAnimal 1 hour ago | parent

If these models will happily recite AGPL 3.0 code as “clean room implementations”, I’m glad that they will also help hobbyists experiment with software. Seems like a fair trade

quasarj 1 hour ago | parent

Trained on the source code?

hootz 55 minutes ago | parent

It's neural piracy, and I am down for it.

pmkary 1 hour ago | parent

Wow. This is insane.

airstrike 1 hour ago | parent

Rich text editing and egui. Interesting choice

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

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

umvi 1 hour ago | parent

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.

phlakaton 1 hour ago | parent

That doesn't make me nervous at all. I've been waiting for the legal challenges from deep pockets to roll in.

I'm not entirely sure they will, though.

aprilthird2021 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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!

conception 1 hour ago | parent

Fork and roll your own.

sbarre 1 hour ago | parent

That's not my point at all.

If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?

ares623 59 minutes ago | parent

Adobe customers are asking that exact same question

_aavaa_ 59 minutes ago | parent

This is how software outside gatekept marketplaces always worked.

tombert 40 minutes ago | parent

Isn't that the risk of literally any software?

Waterluvian 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

AutoDesk is next ?

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

They already have a CAD thing, so I think that’s a safe bet.

kyriakos 1 hour ago | parent

https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft they already made one

Rover222 1 hour ago | parent

You'd rewrite the Bible in Rust at this point

lr0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jrflo 1 hour ago | parent

I see what you're saying, but we're just getting to the start of it being worthwhile to do something like this. Once these projects have people testing them and proposing changes/improvements (AI driven), I don't think it would be long until they are on par with, if not better than the originals.

The only catch will be if attention coalesces around an individual project instead of hundreds of people vibecoding their own versions.

emmo 1 hour ago | parent

Like everything in this stupid, hype-driven AI industry, it's always the "easy" 80% that is done; the actually-difficult final 20% is always waved off with vague future promises.

Eji1700 16 minutes ago | parent

So AI has made everyone managers. Got it.

moron4hire 53 minutes ago | parent

People who don't put in effort to build a thing also don't put in effort to test a thing. The effort creates investment.

strange_quark 46 minutes ago | parent

These apps have to be astroturfed, right? Like I get the desire to give Microsoft and Adobe the middle finger and I guess it's somewhat impressive these apps even do anything, but man are they such buggy pieces of trash. Like you said, I downloaded the Word clone and it's broken in so many ways that I can't even describe what the bugs are. In 5 minutes of messing around, I hit so many random and inconsistent failures of basic functionality like styles, image resizing, and table formatting. Plus the UI is atrocious. All the downsides of Windows apps mixed with all the downsides of a weird cross-platform UI framework.

espeed 1 hour ago | parent

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?

tamimio 51 minutes ago | parent

Just create a blueprint with specs and architecture decisions, software cycle, with product and research docs, plus other needed docs like legal or such, and always use it to make the code. Don’t use memory because the way it gets called by the model isn’t good, and for any updates make the model update the specs too. That’s what I do and the output not just consistent but also future proof for updates or revisions or audits.

adeptima 46 minutes ago | parent

same. got hundreds of specs started from architecture decisions

adeptima 49 minutes ago | parent

most system design pattern for large projects applicable to rust 1:1

as for skills, did similar research 3 months ago, and couldn’t find anything comprehensive …

except this link https://github.com/leonardomso/rust-skills/tree/master/rules

ended up asking claude for code review 3 time and logging best practices in markdown gives compound effect

as a heavy temporal.io user i was never really bothered with async tokio rust gotchas

https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-rust

python libs written in rust under hood is a good source of rustish domain specific best practices too … if you are ok to see lot of “unsafe” code and clever tricks

wackget 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

WillAdams 1 hour ago | parent

LyX or some sort of Markdown editor with robust templates/stylesheets strikes me as more interesting.

A Word clone would have to offer something which Google Docs doesn't which is also what users want.

titzer 1 hour ago | parent

A distributed word processor that is not tied to the behemoth's cloud infrastructure and authentication walled garden would be very nice.

cobychapple 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

jrflo 1 hour ago | parent

While they may be a buggy mess, I think it's really interesting that we're starting to see this unfold in real time. People have been forecasting these kind of changes for the last few years, and it seems like it's actually happening now. Really curious to see where this goes, if everyone has their own custom fork of some common codebase for specific features/needs they have across these base applications.

quasarj 58 minutes ago | parent

The entire Excel implementation is under 50 MiB. The Word one is under 90MiB. Insane. I'm sure the features are incomplete, but both can open the normal Word and Excel files I have laying around. I'm extremely impressed.

ares623 57 minutes ago | parent

Why would people use this rather than existing alternatives with a more established community and maintainers?

pcstl 43 minutes ago | parent

Free.

tombert 41 minutes ago | parent

And they work on Linux. A genius got MS Office working with Wine on Linux in a Nix Flake [1], but that's via a ton of Wine-glue.

These Artcraft apps seem to work on Linux completely fine, at least with the bit I've played with.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401

ares623 37 minutes ago | parent

By alternatives, I mean stuff like LibreOffice and its counterparts.

tombert 34 minutes ago | parent

I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I did the MS Office on Linux thing was because there is a subset of people who want the proper noun Microsoft Office and will use that as an excuse to not move to Linux. My parents, for example.

I don't really use MS Office for anything but Excel since I don't really do WYSIWYG document editing and even if I did I probably would use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or something. LibreOffice Calc just kind of sucks as of right now.

antonvs 24 minutes ago | parent

> A genius got MS Office working with Wine on Linux in a Nix Flake

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

jimmygrapes 48 minutes ago | parent

I have seen many claims about clean room implementations. I've seen the numerous refutations of reverse engineering binaries. I want to believe. But the pace is too coincidental imo. I know someone from Storycraft has been defending this in each thread and has acknowledged the lawsuit issue on other projects, but still, I'm hesitantly curious about patent violation considerations. Feel like I'm missing something here.

bastard_op 23 minutes ago | parent

Visio and Project FTW.