[Wine] Crazy (and just maybe awesome) idea: Winux

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 15:35 -0600, Gullible Jones wrote:

> Anyway... What do you folks think of this idea? Feasible? Or just stupid?
> 
A major problem is the enormous number of system calls that Windows
implements. Last time I knew the numbers, and it was quite a long time
ago, Unix/Linux had under 300 kernel APIs while the contemporary version
of Windows had 3500. This is a reason why developing Wine is such a
problem.

Windows has so many because it appears to be a fairly undisciplined
development shop. Each new version's project team seems to have invented
a whole new set of APIs because they could and to stamp their mark on
it. However, to allow any older programs to continue to run, they still
have to reimplement all the older APIs too. Is it any wonder each new
version is so much more bloated than the previous one?

I think it would take several orders of magnitude less work to write a
new Linux kernel from scratch than it will to add all the Windows APIs
to an existing kernel, whether as built-ins or as a translation layer
like Wine.

  
Martin