Wine Ma os X port

[Lionel Ulmer]

> You cannot have a tool that is going to write the translation layer
> automatically. I guess it is simpler to write it by hand for the Unix
> APIs (maybe a couple thousands at most?), rather than for the Windows
> APIs >> 10 thousands, plus tons of messages, plus tons of callbacks,
> plus poor documentation, etc.

Well, who would need documentation as we HAVE the source of these APIs (ie
the Wine source code itself). My conception of a tool would have been
something like that : each time in the Wine code that a function is
'exportable' to the application itself (be it via DLL loading,
GetProcAddress, COM, ...), its signature could be stored somewhere (as is
already done for relay traces in the .spec files but much more precise).
Then, a tool could then, for any two given architectures, generate
translation thunks from one to the other (which would convert structures
with the various alignements for each platform, ...). Of course, Varargs
function would be hell to simulate (but well, same problem for glibc
translation than for Wine).

The remaining problems would be callbacks. But for these too, as we have
access to the code filling the data given to those, we could also do some
special code handling the various translations.

So, all in all, I still do not see why it would be much more difficult for
Wine rather than for any other library....

                   Lionel (playing devil's advocate)

-- 
		 Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/