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?"

Comments

noooo FP

[Anonymous Coward]

please not - i don't need every windows malware able to run on my mac...

Re:noooo FP

[onefriedrice]

> please not - i don't need every windows malware able to run on my mac...

Except windows malware is just that: malware written for Windows. While it could potentially run, malware wouldn't automatically become a problem. You'd have a much easier time accidently running OS X malware than Windows malware. Think of it as WINE for OS X (which is apparently exactly what it is or will be except Jaguar can load the binaries itself). People running Windows binaries via WINE on Linux don't experience the same problems with malware because the expected security flaws in the underlying OS and/or applications aren't there.

In short, if Apple plans to implement a built-in WINE-like ability to run some Windows binaries in OS X, there is no reason to suspect it will cause a breeding ground for Windows malware. Malware only has the opportunity to run if it can somehow get installed.

Re:noooo FP

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The trouble is they have NIH and so won't just work with the wine project.

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.

Not for Win32 compatibility

[SigILL]

I don't think this is intended for Win32 compatibility. Apple has every reason not to do that, because it will mean there will be no more native versions of high-profile applications such as Photoshop. Adobe is probably already pissed off there won't be a 64-bit version of Carbon, which requires them to rewrite the entire UI of Photoshop in Cocoa to be able to release a 64-bit version of it. Giving them an easy way out by offering Win32 binary-level compatibility isn't in Apple's best interest there.

However, consider that the PE file format is also used by Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR/.NET). Therefore, I think this is a preparatory move to start offering a native implementation of the .NET platform for OS X.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[Marcos Eliziario]

"As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as good as the real thing."

Yeah, most of my pet spywares fail to run correctly under wine.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[jcr]

one of Apple's biggest selling points for the Mac if you go into any store that sells one is that it can "still run all of your Windows stuff."

No. The big selling points are what you can do with the Mac OS. Boot camp is more in the vein of removing a common barrier to a sale.

-jcr

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[SigILL]

Not likely. Apple's not about to sign up to support a Microsoft API on OS X.

You realise it's an open standard, do you? Hell, it's even ISO approved.

Apple would gain a _lot_ by providing support for .NET, without losing much.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[jcr]

Mind telling me what the difference is between a selling point and removing a barrier to sale, exactly?

A selling point is a reason why a product is superior to another product. A barrier to sale is a reason why a customer might be bound to stay with a different product.

You don't buy a Mac because it can run a windows app, since the cheap shit from Dell will do that, too. You buy the Mac for the things that it offers over and above what the Dell box can do.

-jcr

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[Space cowboy]

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.

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 .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.

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

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[SigILL]

Can you quantify this supposed gain?

Sure I can... a little.

Right now, the world's colleges and universities are churning out Java & C# programmers. Those are the popular languages, the ones for which you can almost literally open up a can of programmers for.

Not so with Objective C. It's even starting to get problematic to find competent C++ programmers.

Microsoft's seen the proverbial storm coming, and has been working on an alternative for their aging and clunky Win32 API. Remember a few years back, when the Redmontians announced that Vista (then called Longhorn) would only support .NET programs natively? Back then the world evidently wasn't ready for it. But it's slowly becoming ready, because it's getting harder and harder to find competent C++ programmers.

Meanwhile, Apple is tied to Objective C. A language few people are willing to learn (remember "Objectionable C"?). For very valid technical reasons, Apple is slowly moving its developer base over from C/C++-written Carbon apps to Cocoa apps written in Objective C. However, this makes it even harder for software vendors to find competent developers for their Mac OS X offerings.

So, enter .NET. It's reasonably fast (getting faster), it has plenty of mindshare, and most importantly: there isn't much in the way of a legacy code base for it. Supporting .NET doesn't mean hurting your own APIs, its simply an additional one.

Is that enough of a quantification for you?

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[iJed]

However, consider that the PE file format is also used by Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR/.NET). Therefore, I think this is a preparatory move to start offering a native implementation of the .NET platform for OS X.

I was just about to post this myself... It makes a lot of sense for Apple to support .NET on Mac OS X. For a start C# is now the flagship language for Windows development and not supporting it may be the difference between getting hundreds of ported apps and not getting them at all. As a Mac user and .NET developer I think it would be a big mistake for Apple to ignore .NET.

I wonder if this is how the sandboxed iPhone SDK, which is to be available in February, will be implemented

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[EveLibertine]

bullhonky. Apple _was_ a hardware company. Since they started selling x86 pc's, the only way to distinguish them from any other pc out there is with their software. They are a software company when it comes down to it.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[Durandal64]

Right now, the world's colleges and universities are churning out Java & C# programmers. Those are the popular languages, the ones for which you can almost literally open up a can of programmers for.

Having the "dime a dozen" crowd develop for your platform isn't without its drawbacks. I hear a lot of comments from Windows converts saying that the Mac indy developer scene is smaller than Windows, but the software is almost always of much higher quality and polish. When you make it easy to develop for your platform, you attract lots of developers (good), but the signal-to-noise ratio drops significantly (bad).

Microsoft's seen the proverbial storm coming, and has been working on an alternative for their aging and clunky Win32 API. Remember a few years back, when the Redmontians announced that Vista (then called Longhorn) would only support .NET programs natively? Back then the world evidently wasn't ready for it. But it's slowly becoming ready, because it's getting harder and harder to find competent C++ programmers.

Based on what I've heard from Windows developers, Microsoft needed a good Win32 replacement because Win32 sucked. I've seen some Win32 code; it's not pretty, and the way the UI code connects to what's happening on the screen is a complete mystery to me. When I learned Cocoa and Objective-C, the connections were intuitive and obvious.

Meanwhile, Apple is tied to Objective C. A language few people are willing to learn (remember "Objectionable C"?).

I'm sure that'll change in February of 2008. Then lots of people will probably be interested in learning Objective-C.

So, enter .NET. It's reasonably fast (getting faster), it has plenty of mindshare, and most importantly: there isn't much in the way of a legacy code base for it. Supporting .NET doesn't mean hurting your own APIs, its simply an additional one.

Apple tried that kind of thing before with the Java/Cocoa bridge. It's now been deprecated because it was a pain in the ass to maintain, and no one was using it. A .Net bridge would require that Apple map all the .Net standard classes to their own. They might be able to do toll-free bridging to underlying CoreFoundation types (like dictionaries, strings, etc ...), but I don't know if C# supports the kind of dynamic typing that makes it possible through the C/Objective-C combination. I suspect it does. But it'd still be a lot of work.

Instead, Apple is offering Python and Ruby Objective-C bridges, and that makes a lot more sense. They've got bridging support for arbitrary scripting languages into the Objective-C runtime, enabling web developers to write native Mac OS X applications using native APIs. Whatever Apple does with respect to additional language support in the future, you can bet Objective-C will be a part of it. The language allows for a lot of dynamism and flexibility, and on top of that, it's a strict C superset, which means that there are no special wrappers required to call down to the POSIX layer. So it's just easy to bridge other languages with it.

At the end of the day, Objective-C just doesn't get the credit it deserves. It's a very well thought-out language with lots of power. Most people just don't see it because they think Objective-C is Apple's "proprietary" language or some such nonsense.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[duffbeer703]

Q: Where do I go to buy OS X for my commodity PC?
A: I don't.

Mac OS, iTunes, the iTunes Music store, etc exist for one purpose: to sell Macs, iPhones, iPods, etc. The software simply isn't where the company makes the money. The old regime almost bankrupted Apple by switching to a Microsoft-like software licensing model... so I doubt that Apple would go back to that.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[The One and Only]

Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. They're a systems company. They sell a complete system that they put together. The hardware might have an Intel CPU, an nVidia graphics card or a Marvell WiFi controller, and the software might have a Mach kernel, a KDE-derived web browser, or a GNU compiler, but you don't have to invent your own kitchen sink or air conditioner to build a great house, either.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[coolGuyZak]

You fail to differentiate between .Net and C#. By and large, I criticize the former. I can see where you might get the wrong idea, though, so I'll elaborate.

The .Net framework suggests that the prototype for an event is as follows: "ret_type event( Object sender, EventArgs_subclass e )". Compare with a "typical" windows callback mechanism: "ret_type function( HWND hParam, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam )". Suspiciously similar, neh? HWND corresponds to "Object sender", and the W- and L- PARAM objects are wrapped into EventArgs.

EventArgs and its sub-classes encapsulate all of the data given to a particular handler, much like W- and L- params, which changed meanings depending on call context. Some EventArgs subclasses also perform odd tasks, for instance the CancelEventArgs.Cancel property. This is the downright stupidest OOP implementation I've ever seen. Cancel is not data, it's an action. I don't want to specify the "cancelness" of the data, I want to cancel an operation. A better design would be to send a message back to the sending object that says, "I can't validate this." Unfortunately, because .Net event handlers use the ambiguous "object handle." I'd need a cast before I could send my response.

The complexity of implementing a cancel message is likely greater than CancelEventArgs, but the solution is far more intuitive. We don't even need to go as far as sending a message, though. Provide a real type to the sender argument (for instance, ICancelableControl, or just Control), and provide a Cancel method, and I'd be happy.

Performance is a shoddy argument for the lack of a message passing system, because .Net treats the event system as a messaging network anyway. AFAIAC, use events, but add more formality to the event system. Call your EventArgs what they are -- a message--and type the sending object appropriately. Finally, differentiate functioanlly between events and multicast delegates. Events should manage their subscription list; if an object subscribing to an event is garbage collected, fail silently. If the event lacks subscribers, then succeed.

And now for something completely different.

Everyone knows MSDN is a steaming pile of crap. What's worse, Microsoft seems to be doing very little to correct that image. IMHO, this is a mistake. As a developer, my first exposure to .Net is through MSDN--fundamentally, it's marketing for techies. It should be thorough, describing how components interact, typical real-world use cases for code, the history or motivation of a particular interface, etc. MSDN should serve the same function as an O'Reilly book--set a mood and mindset for development.

MS can spend as much money developing the perfect language as they want, but without the proper supporting tools--and don't get me started on the woes of VS--their efforts piss people off. This is precisely the motivation for the GGP's note that Objective-C developers are so "happy" and my "bullshit" post.

Re:Watch out microsoft

[g0at]

Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple. Plus you wouldn't need to sit around hoping that WINE decides to support that application. Eh? Did you copy/paste this from a discussion five years ago?

-b

Most likely there for EFI

[dpokorny]

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.

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 /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.

Loading PE is not a big deal

[apankrat]

The actual problem is resolving all external dependencies of Windows-bound binaries. If the Win32 API is somehow emulated (see Wine project for some "minor" details), this leaves (an ungodly mess of) COM interfaces. Then even if this is taken care of, Apple is going to be quite exposed to a legal beating from MS.

Lastly, "Is Apple planning native PE execution within OSX?" - if they were _planning_ that, they wouldn't include this into a production release of the OS. This means that it's already used for something. The big question is what exactly.

Re:Win32 on OS X -- goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not true. Anyone remember when IBM did this with OS/2? It killed the market for OS/2 software, because every developer just wrote for the lowest common denominator (Windows) instead of making "native" OS/2 software. Adding Windows application support in Mac OS X would kill the platform slowly.

PE Loading on x86 is easy,,,

[Jeff_at_RAD]

Our game middleware products load PE format binaries on GNU/Linux and MacOS. It's like 200 lines of code to load and fix up a DLL - not difficult at all.

The two wins are that we have one binary on all x86 platforms (which usually means testing on one platform is sufficient) and that the MS compiler generates faster binaries. The downside is that when you *do* have to debug on the non-native platforms, you must resort to printf-style debugging.

You also have to replace the default MS crt, because they make a lot of Win32 calls that you don't want to have to emulate. We just have a tiny OS layer for memory, file IO, threading, audio, and video that is native (about 30 functions).

Re:Watch out microsoft

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...there have also been plenty of complaints that the OSX version is buggy and doesn't run as well.

Umm, I've mostly heard complaints that the Windows version is buggier actually. There is plenty of software that is badly ported or not available on OS X, but you picked a crappy example. Of course it cuts both ways, since iTunes on Windows is pretty crappy by comparison, and you can't get OmniGraffle at all.

Plus how many people avoids becoming switchers because you can't run games?

Some, but not as many as most people on Slashdot probably think. The hardcore gamer market is not as large as it is vocal. The casual gamer has a several year old machine and by the time they own one that can play a given game, most of them (especially outside the hardcore market) are ported to OS X. The top 10 games in a given year account for about half of game sales, and the last time I checked, 8 out of 10 had been ported within a year.

When did they release a Mac version of Halo? What about Halflife?

That's where a lot of people are misled. Most gamers could not run Halo on their machine for years, even if the owned a PC. And what most people care about is The Sims. In fact, if you look at the list of top selling games of all time, according to wikipedia you have:

1. The Sims (16 million shipped) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
2. StarCraft (9.5 million) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
3. World of Warcraft (9.3 million subscribers) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
4. Half-Life (8 million) - Windows release only, no Mac - there are some interesting theories why.
5. Diablo II (4 million) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
6. Myst (6 million) - Mac release before Windows

Do you see how the average, gamer who is not hardcore would not be too perturbed by the lack of choice?

Running Windows apps natively would make no sense

[LKM]

I think Gruber had it right when he said that Apple wants its users to think of Windows as the new Classic, i.e. if Windows apps run inside Mac OS X, they should do so the way Mac OS 9 apps used to run inside OS X: With distinctly different windows, in a separate environment, and a bit glitchy. Users need to be reminded that running Windows apps is not the preferred choice, but merely a last resort.

The idea is to tell users "Yeah, you can run your Windows apps using Parallels or VMWare if you really have to, but if you can, we'd much rather you ran real Mac applications." Running Windows apps quasi-natively by implementing the APIs would send the wrong message; it would put Windows apps on the same or a similar level as Mac apps. That's a bad thing: The Mac relies on Mac-only or "better on Macs" applications; the high quality of software is one of the Mac's selling point. If developers could write Windows apps and they would run on Macs just fine, hey, why not write Windows apps and have five or ten times the market at no additional cost?

Of course, I'd personally love to see something like this; Office for Macs is about to lose support for Macros, so I'll probably have to run Office in Parallels, soon. Come to think of it... Maybe that's Apple's way of fixing Microsoft's Macro Mistake? Maybe the idea is to let Windows Office run natively on Macs?

Anyway, Apple's actions have been extremely hard to predict recently, so I'm not ruling out anything. Maybe they are indeed going to give the Windows APIs the Carbon treatment...