Rumor: Windows Apps Running Native on Your Mac

[Darwin]

Courtesy of the WIRED blog via Lifehack.

[attachthumb=#]

My Lord! If this rumour turns out to be true, the next couple of years could be REALLY interesting (from an battle of the OS superpowers perspective...).

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/rumor-leopard-i.html

[Ralf Maximus]

Well now, that *is* interesting.

All sorts of ramifications.  For instance, what would happen to the Mac Office division at Microsoft? 

[cranioscopical]

For instance, what would happen to the Mac Office division at Microsoft?

I guess they'd both be out of a job!

[f0dder]

Look, all they have found is signs of PE loading, which really is no big deal. For this to be useful for running windows applications on OS X, you'd need an API translation layer as well, which is a huge project.

Not saying it's not interesting, just that it's not as big a deal as some people seem to think.

[justice]

So are these Leopard loaders a sign that Apple is working on a way to run Windows apps within OS X? Possibly, though if they ran natively, without proper sandboxing, OS X could end up vulnerable to Windows viruses and malware, something Apple obviously wants to avoid.

Introduced in Leopard however is exactly such a sandboxing technology used for certain processes. That said the news is not even a rumor really.

[f0dder]

So are these Leopard loaders a sign that Apple is working on a way to run Windows apps within OS X? Possibly, though if they ran natively, without proper sandboxing, OS X could end up vulnerable to Windows viruses and malware, something Apple obviously wants to avoid.

Introduced in Leopard however is exactly such a sandboxing technology used for certain processes. That said the news is not even a rumor really.

"could end up vulnerable to Windows viruses and malware" - nah. That line shows the author doesn't really have a clue about how malware works

[Ralf Maximus]

How easy would a straight port of WINE be?

[Eóin]

Well WINE seems to work on FreeBSD and NetBSD so I can't imagine a port would be infeasible. A quick check turned up the Darwine sf.net project but not sure how active it is.

[nontroppo]

According to some far-out theorising, there are claims that Apple already has a fully licenced XP API (something to do with their 5 year cross-licencing deal initiated in 1997), rumours furthering that people have seen this mythical beast already running in Cupertino:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060420_000893.html


More smoke'n'mirrors here (better comments at least than Wired): http://origin.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/30/uncovered-evidence-that-mac-os-x-could-run-windows-apps-soon

r.e. Darwine - it works well apparently. Also there is a commercial spinoff which guarantee's compatibility with a subset of Win apps, which is pretty popular: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

[f0dder]

I only had a quick glimpse at the pbs.org article, but it seemed pretty bull... a statement like "Speed. Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel presently used in OS X 10.4." is so utterly crappy, as kernel design has nothing to do with raw computing speed, but only things like how kernel calls are handled.

As for "rumours furthering that people have seen this mythical beast already running in Cupertino", perhaps somebody confused parallels with the real deal

[nontroppo]

Hey f0dder, quit ruining the salacious gossip with logic   

[Lashiec]

Apple likes to lay nuggets within OS X codebase. The ZFS file system, Windows API... I wonder if the so rumored FLAC support in 10.5 might be lurking there as well

[f0dder]

Does OS X come with ZFS support, or does it just have bits and pieces like the PE support mentioned above?

FLAC support in kernel? heh. That belongs as a codec for iTunes, nothing else. Retards if they don't already have support for that, but my mac-using friend bitched about it.

[Lashiec]

AFAIK, OS X 10.5 have read-only support for the ZFS filesystem. There's some tool released by Apple that gives complete read and write control of the filesystem, but I ignore its utility.

D'oh! I should have clarified that the support would have come with a new release of iTunes that would be released at the same time that OS X 10.5, that is, packed with it. It didn't happen anyway, seems that the only update iTunes receives nowadays is for supporting newer models of the iPod. Not that it troubles me, though

[nontroppo]

AFAIK, OS X 10.5 have read-only support for the ZFS filesystem.

Though not confirmed, I think ZFS was going to be a new fully supported file system, but they couldn't stabilise and it got pulled, leaving only the read support (probably the write support is just disabled). The developer tools which come with Leopard enable read/write for developer testing.