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Native Windows PE File Loading on OS X?
ozmanjusri writes "Coders working on Wine for Mac have found that the Mac loader has gained its own undocumented ability to load and understand Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. They found PE loading capabilities in Leopard that weren't there in Tiger. Further dissection showed that Apple is masking references to 'Win' and 'PE' in the dll, which means it's not an accidental inclusion. Is Apple planning native PE execution within OS X?"
The most probable reason for Apple to have partial support for the PE executable format is EFI. Both the firmware itself and all of the drivers embedded within it use the PE object format.
/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi -- it has the same "This program cannot be run in DOS mode." at the beginning of the executable like every other PE executable.
If they want to natively host EFI development and not use Windows to do it, then some level PE support is required.
Just take a look at
You realise it's an open standard, do you? Hell, it's even ISO approved.
Apple would gain a _lot_ by providing support for
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
I'd personally hate it if they gave up the beautiful elegance that is ObjC and forced Apple developers to move to Java or .NET.
.NET and ObjC/Cocoa. It frequently (despite the obvious potential bias given the name of the site) argues that the ObjC method for doing something is better thought out, more elegant, or simply more capable than the corresponding .NET approach.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: Objective C is exactly at the sweet spot for a computer language - it has all the power of C (it's a formal superset), the nice features of a true object-orientated language (OOP, garbage collection, protocols, etc.), adds in dynamic dispatch (thus removing the need for generics), and does it all by adding about a dozen commands to the C language. The only thing against it is the unfamiliar (to C/C++ programmers) syntax. Really, though, how hard is it to make the mental leap to [myObject insertObject:xxx atPosition:yyy] from myObject->insertObjectAtPosition(xxx,yyy) ? And which is the more readable ?
Plus, the class library is *very* well designed. It makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. A lot of hard things are pretty easy too... There's a site that often compares
Objective C is a classic example of how a simple clear approach can reap huge rewards in terms of usability and flexibility. It's not the over-designed bloat-fest that is C++ (template metaprogramming ? Really ?), and it's not the raw pedal-to-the-metal-hear-the-engine-scream-in-protest of plain old C. I've never yet met anyone give it a fair try (ie: write a real program in it) and not end up loving the language.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Apple? NIH?!? Umm, the BSD subsystem, Webkit from KDE, OpenStep from Next, BeOS bits recreated, MAC from TrustedBSD, PDF as the basis for their display from Adobe, dtrace from Solaris, Apache, CalDav from Oracle... I could go on.
Apple might avoid the WINE codebase, but only because they have rights to much of an older version of the Windows API directly from having won a lawsuit against MS quite a while ago when MS stole their code. I don't think Apple would otherwise have a problem supporting WINE and I would not be surprised if Apple employees have submitted code to WINE or one of the offshoot projects. I think, however, they're probably content with the current ease of running Windows apps, inconvenient enough that not many mainstream developers can ignore OS X, but easy enough so that businesses are not put off and people are not afraid of trying OS X as their primary OS. I would not be surprised, actually, if this feature was added at the request of Parallels, whose latest RC supports making Windows apps the default for opening filetypes in OS X (which will launch the VM and open the file in the specified application.