X86/PPC linking (was Re: [Darwine] Re: Wine Emulation: Swapping functions)

[Jim White]

Mike Hearn wrote:

> ...
>> As for swapping functions, the preceding discussion reiterates my 
>> belief that we should confine such fussy business to the relatively 
>> small bit of code that calls into OS X, will be relatively stable over 
>> the long haul, and over which we have full control.  And as for the 
>> concern over having Wine be X86 and hence incurring emulation 
>> overhead, this would be one of the first bits of code which would be a 
>> candidate for having its emulator-compiled code cached.
> 
> If you look at how many native imports Wine requires on Linux to get 
> full functionality I don't think you can say it's relatively small. It's 
> many thousands of functions, possibly more. It's hard to measure because 
> so much is dynamically loaded.

This is the more general project that has emerged from my initial idea 
for Darwine, namely X86/Linux binary compatibility for OS X.  There are 
quite a few folks working on various combinations of 
Linux/BSD/Darwin/Mach compatibility, but only for the native processor. 
  While there has been a ton of end user interest in Darwine in order to 
run Windows apps, I have found that integrating CPU emulation into the 
kernel compatibility layer attracts broad developer interest.  As we 
work through the implementation of Darwine I believe we will have 
solutions for all these problems and OS X will indeed become quite the 
Swiss Army knife of platforms.

Jim White