Architecture/To-Dos

This page intends to collect various architectural deficiencies (aka the pet peeves of various people) of OpenOffice.org, and lists the areas where's work in progress to improve on the architecture.

Depending on the specific count algorithm, OOo consists of approximately 7E6 lines of code (the overwhelming lot being c++, all other being an order of magnitude less (Java, Perl, Basic, Python)). This sheer size in and of itself is a problem - the code base is notorious for crashing or slowing down to a crawl various software engineering tools, from debugger to dependency analysis to reverse design extraction.

The code itself varies greatly in quality, style, and age (the latter invariably leading to the former, if you recall the history and evolvement of c++), with parts being there virtually unmodified for 10+ years, and others just recently written from scratch.

Taken together, this leads to a lot of complexity and redundancy, which is very hard to remove. What follows are some concrete instantiations of the aforementioned symptoms.