A Wine-like compatibility layer to run Mac OS X programs on Linux?

[Markus Hitter]

Am 09.11.2007 um 02:28 schrieb Greg K Nicholson:

> Is a compatibility layer (like Wine) to run Mac OS X programs on Linux
> feasible? Does one already exist?

I'm aware of about 5 emulators (PearPC, mac-on-linux, Basilisk,  
SheepShaver, qemu) having various extents of Mac OS and Mac OS X  
support.

Then, there's GNUstep with it's Cocoa compatible API: Porting Mac OS  
X apps to Linux is possible.

> It seems to me, the uneducated layman, that it should be *easier* to
> make a Mac compatibility layer (“Mine”?) than one for Windows  
> since: [...]

Don't forget all the CoreFoundation, CoreAudio, CoreWhatever and  
Carbon stuff. Many Apps use Java, AppleScript, Ruby, Python (all  
Apple-tweaked and with bindings to other technologies). Even "pure"  
Cocoa apps peek into other technologies here and there. From the API  
perspective, Mac OS X is just a big mess.


So, a tightly integrated hardware-level emulator should be possible,  
but at an API level, I'd see a huuuuge effort.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/