Main sources of Wine complexity

[Ivan]

(short summary: why is emulation of Windows environment so difficult).

First of all, my apologies if this is an off-topic question for this list
but I hope it will be useful for others in the similar situation.

I need to port fairly large WinAPI-heavy application to Linux. After some
googling it becomes clear that there's nothing except for Wine/Winelib
which is *huge*. However for at least most basic WinAPI functions it looks
fairly easy to just re-implement it via Boost/STL/libc/Linux syscalls. Why
there's nothing small like this already? Why only Wine with like 3 millions
LoC and run-time dependencies?

Is the approach described above make some sense for at least most common
functionality (threading, IPC, file operations) w/o things like UI,
graphics and registry. For instance, we need to either re-implement around
200 WinAPI functions (mostly events, mutexes, semaphore, sockets, file and
folder operations) or to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Using
Winelib directly is not an option due to the nature of the app. Any
help/advices are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
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