LibreOffice Sees New Activity For Compiling To WebAssembly

Last May there was some work on compiling LibreOffice to WebAssembly as another means of getting this open-source office suite executing within the web browser and other environments. It had been quiet since on the LibreOffice WASM front but a number of new commits were merged this morning.

Jan-Marek Glogowski is back at it working on compiling LibreOffice to WebAssembly. Merged today were more bits and pieces, setting it up as a non-multi-user, desktop build, and other build updates around WebAssembly / EmScripten support.

This activity comes with LibreOffice 7.3 already being branched ahead of its release in February, so we'll see how much more WebAssembly development activity and interest there is for the office suite's cycle ahead to see what sort of shape it will be in come August. Outside of safe browser execution, there is growing interest among many for WebAssembly to be a portable format for software on the desktop with various run-times / implementations for sandboxed execution in a performant manner.