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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It almost worked, unfortunately MacOS reserves x18 for platform purposes and Linux doesn’t.
The result is some sort of pretty mad contraption which works sufficiently often to compile aarch64 Linux VPP and its dependencies on the Mac using Linux gcc :)
I suppose with some polish it might be useful for something..
Darling only targets x86_64 stuff. Still, it's a cool project.
Kinda sad that there are very few updates though [1]
[1] https://blog.darlinghq.org/
> We do, and in fact, Darling is largely based on the original Darwin source code published by Apple. We use The Cocotron as a basis for our Cocoa implementation, along with the Apportable Foundation and various bits of GNUstep.
Apportable (<3) was a YC startup https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable from 2011 - the Foundation repo last update was Dec 2014.
All I want for Christmas is Logic on Linux. But then you’d still need a Mac to legally download it from the App Store and DRM checks would probably only work on Macs
But you are probably looking for this:
It is still far away from running your favorite mac GUI apps like Logic Pro or Xcode, but it is a work in progress but can still run command line tools.It is a technical thing.
The XNU[0] kernel, which underpins macOS and is detailed by the exceptional book "Mac OS X internals"[1], can theoretically run on many x86 and/or ARM machines. However, the issue with running macOS apps via other operating systems is not the OS, but instead are the GUI frameworks expected (i.e., Carbon[2], Quartz[3], etc.). These frameworks are intentionally written for Apple hardware/macOS distros. Which makes sense when viewing macOS as a selling point for selling Mac's.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
1 - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17205558M/Mac_OS_X_internals
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep
I don't think the project kept up with changes to the APIs over the decades compared to how well the Wine project kept up with changes in Windows.
No, it did not. There was no point at which GNUstep provided binary compatibility with Mac OS applications - while the two ecosystems shared some common history, it was much too far back to provide any form of compatibility. Additionally, Mac OS X used a different executable format than Linux or other UNIX-like operating systems, and GNUstep never attempted to provide that sort of low-level compatibility.
(For perspective: the GNUstep project started in the early 1990s. Mac OS X was first released to users in 2001.)
I said "used to" because anecdotally, I had a personal project I haven't released anywhere target AppKit, I haven't been maintaining it because life is busy, I recently rebuilt it for the first time in a long time and I was shocked that everything worked. ~8 years ago, you would need to do some porting to a new major release once per year. I skipped that maintenance for many releases and didn't need to change a single line. This tells me that desktop apps are not at all an area of major focus for them lately. Maybe swiftui is getting all the attention. They are doing something more resembling Microsoft, leaving the old shit alone.
A lot of work done over 3 decades. Wine also started when Win32 was something comprehensible by one person, so they could build it up slowly.