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Operating Systems => macOS => Topic started by: M51DPS on 12 February 2006, 04:36

Title: Darwine
Post by: M51DPS on 12 February 2006, 04:36

What do people think about it? The 0.9.7 Developer Preview has recently been released (http://darwine.opendarwin.org/), and it's popularity will probably take off very soon. Will it convert more people to Macintosh? Will it provide less incentive to create native programs?

For those not familiar, Darwine is a port of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) to Mac OS X. It works by translating the Win32 API's, rather than an processor. In order to run on PPC systems instead of Intel based ones, it uses an emulator called QEMU (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) in conjunction with Wine.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: cymon on 12 February 2006, 05:13

It'll also be slower than a third grader in Calc II Honors and will continue the great Wine tradition of not working with certain apps.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: Orethrius on 12 February 2006, 07:09

Quote from: cymon

It'll also be slower than a third grader in Calc II Honors and will continue the great Wine tradition of not working with certain apps.

 That is, considering that ANY layer between native-architecture APIs is going to slow the system down somewhat (ever see a bilingual translator tell someone who speaks English what someone is saying in Japanese, in realtime?  Didn't think so...) and is unlikely to work in every circumstance, particularly where proprietary classes with no open-source equivalents are utilised?

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: Aloone_Jonez on 12 February 2006, 13:03

It's quite paradoxic how Wine Is Not an Emulator but it requires and emulator to run on PPC.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: Dark_Me on 12 February 2006, 16:24

Quote from: Aloone_Jonez

It's quite paradoxic how Wine Is Not an Emulator but it requires and emulator to run on PPC.

I thought it would have been simple to figure out. WINE is designed to run on x86 arcitecture and therefor needs a emulator to run on PPC arcitecture. Unless API's aren't affected by arcitecture.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: Aloone_Jonez on 12 February 2006, 17:51

I know.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: M51DPS on 13 February 2006, 02:47

Quote from: cymon

It'll also be slower than a third grader in Calc II Honors and will continue the great Wine tradition of not working with certain apps.

Granted, it will never be as fast as native applications, but I think it should at least be usable, especially on Intel Macs where QEMU is not needed.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: piratePenguin on 13 February 2006, 02:53

Quote from: M51DPS

Granted, it will never be as fast as native applications, but I think it should at least be usable, especially on Intel Macs where QEMU is not needed.

But could you not just use wine on intel macs?

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: cymon on 13 February 2006, 03:45

Quote from: M51DPS

Granted, it will never be as fast as native applications, but I think it should at least be usable, especially on Intel Macs where QEMU is not needed.

I can only hope it's a little faster than QEMU, seeing as how you're not emulating an entire OS, just the x86 machine code for one program. Of course, you wouldn't be able to run anything too CPU intensive in it. However, it does have an option to recompile Windows apps for PowerPC. I wish that people hadn't stopped making PC compatability cards for macs. Sun makes them for their UltraSPARC systems, and while most Macs aren't that upgradeable, you could still have an external unit, if possible.

Title: Re: Darwine
Post by: M51DPS on 13 February 2006, 21:25

Quote from: piratePenguin

But could you not just use wine on intel macs?

Basically, that's what Darwine does on Intel Macs. Because you do not need QEMU, all you are basically getting is Wine compiled and tweaked to work with OS X (or really, to work with Darwin) and (hopefully soon) a Quartz driver so you do not need to use X11.