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Interview - Jim White of the Darwine project

Posted by Hemos on from the bettering-the-platform dept.

Kelly McNeill writes "The Darwine project intends to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications. It is an open source project led by a growing number of developers including Emmanuel Maillard, Pierre d'Herbemont and Sanjay Connare. osOpinion/osViews had the privilege to speak to with the project's administrator, (Jim White) to tell us more about Darwine and where the project is headed. For those that don't know, Darwine is Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) for OS X on PPC. The following is the transcribed dialog of their conversation which is also available in an audible format on osRadio.com."

4 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Clarification by torstenvl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the website: "We are currently working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 a Win32 .exe should run within wine" http://darwine.opendarwin.org/faq.php#5

    So yeah it will involve an emulator on PPC but remember that Darwin is also on x86. So WINE will still be NE but will be used in conjunction with something that IE (is an emulator). :-)

  2. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought wine only simulated the Windows API calls, so you still need to be running the program on the native windows cpu, x86. Can someone explain how this works on PPC?

    Do you realize that in less time than it took for you to write your questions, you could have clicked the link and saw that it uses QEMU to map x86 to PPC instruction calls.

    It didn't even require a 'googling' on your part, just a click.

  3. Re:More pollution of OSX UI by agby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its bad enough that Metal and Aqua are mixed interchangably without any rhyme or reason...mix in X11 apps and now Windows apps and I think we can safely say that visual consistency in OSX is gone.

    There is actually supposed to be some rhyme and reason to the Aqua/Metal looks in OSX:

    Apple Human Interface Guidelines

    See the section on Windows -> Window Appearance -> Brushed Metal Windows

    However, if developers choose not to adhere to these guidelines, there's little that can be done, unless the apps get hacked. Turning on metal is as simple as toggling a switch in XCode and Interface builder. You can disable the metal look in Safari by editing it's preferences as well...

  4. A mature Darwine will be far from useless by notNeilCasey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The idea for as I understand it is this:

    When the project is complete, OS X users will be able to open EXE files with Darwine. Darwine will use QEMU to execute the x86 instructions, however when the program makes calls to the Windows API, Darwine calls those functions in WineLib compiled natively for PPC.

    So, where Bochs and VirtualPC and others like them emulate the entire operating system environment (Emulated BIOS, emulated hardware, emulated Windows, and finally the emulated x86 application ... overhead city), Darwine allows applications to run essentially linked to native code - Wine/WineLib for PPC.

    Thus for most Windows applications, the GUI and event handling and everything else the Windows API is good for will be executed in native PPC code. QEMU will then emulate an x86 processor for all the compiled code in the application.

    Imagine some internal corporate application that uses all standard Windows widgets to let a user interact with some data: all those widgets plus the menu and root pane will be handled by the native WineLib code except when the programmer has included some special functions or number-crunching routines that are emulated on QEMU's fake x86.

    Think about it -- It's a lot better than having an entire emulated instance of Windows 98 (and maybe even an actual x86 box) to do the same thing.