On the Wine mailing list, there is some interesting information on Leopard's apparent ability to load basic Windows binaries. "When tracking down a crash in the kernel32 loader test, Dmitry found a bug in the Mac OS loader when Wine tried to load his dummy PE file. Upon further research I found that the Mac loader seems to have its own undocumented PE loader built in. I did some further testing with a Windows binary and got some really interesting results." The first thought was that this was a remnant from Mac OS X' EFI support, but upon further investigation, this really seems like new, Leopard-specific behaviour: "This is new to Leopard. On Tiger, dlopen rejects PE files as expected. The Wine testing that Steven was originally trying to do would probably not crash on Tiger." Apparently, Apple is trying its best to hide this behaviour.
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Member since:2005-07-06
if they can run win32 then the reasons not to switch diminish.
The drawback is if it runs them to well that no-one will develop osx natively (im basing thison what happened with os/2)
I bet if it runs windows it wouldnt be long before MS stopped making a mac version of office and started saying "use the pc version it works, just not as well as on windows.."
Member since:2005-07-06
Just like nobody writes Cocoa apps, because there's X11?
If Win32 support comes to OSX on some day, it has to be good enough to be useable, but "bad enough" to not provide any reason to drop support for native app development. Kinda like Cider (Transgaming's Wine fork) that's no so good that all those new "native" EA games for Mac are just Win32 binaries wrapped in a Wine bundle.
Member since:2005-07-07
It also means that programs are going to be much easier to port. You can cobble up together a Cocoa interface to whatever functionality that is contained in Win32 DLL files. This is pretty cool, since there are many commercial libraries that are not available on OS X (the most notable being Direct X).
Member since:
2006-01-23
So, if they get to the point where you can run win32 programs from OSX that will be cool.