Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 29th Nov 2007 21:22 UTC, submitted by Steven Edwards
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:
2006-01-06
It's still possible that it is related to .NET support.
Microsoft's SSCLI runs on OS X as does Silverlight. Silverlight 2.0 will contain a complete .NET runtime.
It seems likely that Microsoft will work with Apple to write a complete .NET implementation for Mac OS X (much like Sun does with Java).
My theory on the PE support is that early development work for .NET for Mac has already begun and that some of the native code that .NET relies on is still in PE format binaries.
I could imagine a situation where Library A depends on Library B, but Library A does not make any OS calls. If Library B is ported then Library A will work "for free" as long as the binary can be loaded.