[fao_]

> How much does LibreOffice do that Word 5.0 doesn't, really?

It has to support and parse a billion more formats. Including the fact that MS word file formats are in some cases literal dumps from word's memory (iirc).

Rendering things properly is also a difficult problem to solve. Look how difficult it has been for much of the 21st century, to get a webpage uniform across all major browsers, and then realised that you not only have to display the same across all major browsers, but also be 30 years backwards compatible.

[vetrom]

On a modern OS (like anything in the last 25-odd years that has demand paging) that code isn't even loaded into RAM before it's used in many situations.

While that is an additional load if you deal with those formats, the root of things like startup and runtime bloat lie elsewhere.

[EmpirePhoenix]

Well one should also consider, that a really large amount of code and complexity is that current applications properly do i18n.

[tremon]

> support and parse a billion more formats

> Rendering things properly

These should not affect startup performance though.

[fao_]

When do you want to incur the overhead? Do you want a user to wait once for 40 seconds, or wait 10 extra seconds for something to load/save because you're loading shit on the fly. It's a question of trade-offs.