OS X emulation layer for Linux

http://darling.dolezel.info/en/Darling

by ilikehunny • 13 years ago

234 54 13 years ago

darling.dolezel.info

lubomir2• 13 years ago

About a week ago, the author posted a report to his blog http://www.abclinuxu.cz/blog/doli/2013/7/darling-progress-re....

Summary:

  * It can run basic console programs like Midnight Commander, vim
    or bash, so compatibility of system API is rather good.
  * Dynamic loader is being refactored, because it can not unload
    dynamic libraries now. In the future there will be API that
    would allow loading OS X library into native code.
  * There is a FUSE module for read-only access to .dmg files, so
    that it is not necessary to unpack them.

GNUstep is a problem; it does not seem to be very alive. It does have three backends, but none of them works reliably. The long term (slightly crazy) plan is to implement the basic Cocoa classes over Qt.

Right now the target application that should work is Angry Birds.

jaxb• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Win32 emulation layer for OS/2 which had Quake 2 as target application :)

lubomir2• 13 years ago

The given reason for that is that it is a popular game that has no native version (so no one will ask why he is porting Midnight Commander) and it does not use much OS X API. It uses OpenGL, OpenAL, IOKit (for finding input devices), AppKit (creating window), CGL (for configuring OpenGL) and CoreVideo (for running main loop).

edmccard• 13 years ago

That was Odin32, right? I remember looking forward to that, and hoping that it would be better than the win32s extensions for 3.11 (plus the .dll whack-a-mole that entailed), but in the end I just switched from OS/2 to XP.

peatmoss• 13 years ago

I can't figure out why GNUstep has languished so. Given how many ObjC developers there are out there, and given how nice it would be to target for multi-platform apps, it feels like the sort of thing that should have gotten good pretty quickly in a world of resurgent Apple.

jballanc• 13 years ago

...and this is the moment that you realize there aren't so many Obj-C developers out there as much as there are that many iOS developers out there, all being forced to use one particular language.

Edit: For the record, I am a fan of Obj-C, not an iOS developer, and would love to see more movement on GNUStep. I just need the time...

mjn• 13 years ago

My outside read of the project is that it began losing steam long before iOS brought a large number of new ObjC developers. It was initially riding on the buzz around NeXT, which generated a lot of excitement around what the future of desktop computing might be (sort of parallel to the buzz around BeOS). And they got some ecosystem help; it was initially an implementation of the circa-1994 OpenStep specification. But NeXT enthusiasm waned through the latter part of the '90s.

I remember trying it around the same time as I tried Enlightenment 16, around 2001 or 2002, and at the time the user and development community felt quite small, much less active than E's.

aryastark2• 13 years ago

All Objective-C programmers I know are really iOS programmers trying to make a quick buck. Most of these people either aren't aware of GNUstep, or wouldn't care since they have OS X.

GNUstep is old. It predates the revival of Apple and the return of Steve Jobs. In the late '90s the Linux community declared war on Microsoft and decided the best way to destroy them would be to make a clone of Windows. Hence the focus on KDE and GNOME. Meanwhile, less attention was given to projects like Window Maker and GNUstep. IMO, the Linux community bet on the wrong horse. But then again, who the hell was using ObjC other than NeXT? No one, that's who. We may as well be talking about Tcl/Tk or Motif at that point. NeXT/GNUstep/ObjC were all seen as an obsolete curiosity. Kinda like Amiga was. So unfortunately, GNUstep never really gained momentum.

I must say, Window Maker was my preferred desktop up until 2006 or so. Before that, it was AfterStep. So yeah, I might be a bit bitter over the whole situation.

vivin• 13 years ago

I did some work on GNUStep, but it was painful. The development environment isn't very friendly and there isn't very good IDE support. Also, most of the documentation I saw was for Apple's stuff with very little for GNUStep.

I was eventually able to gain access to a Mac to be able to develop, and it made things much more easier.

mattrepl2• 13 years ago

Using Qt as a Cocoa stand-in sounds complicated. Since Darling already uses its own loader and syscall hooking to provide compatibility for the program, why not do the same for a framework like Cocoa?

zw2• 13 years ago

Same type of deal as in Wine, copyright-type stuff.

lsllc• 13 years ago

Cocotron has been at this for a while:

http://www.cocotron.org/

(EDIT: Gave Cocotron an 'a' it didn't deserve!)

paraboul• 13 years ago

hm nope. Looks like Darling is meant to provide a binary compatible interface (Darling is similar to wine except that it targets OSX instead of win32/64) whereas Cocoatron provides a source code level of compatibility (you have to build your app with Cocoatron libs/APIs).

pygy_• 13 years ago

Cocotron (without "a") and GNUStep are intended as source-level compatibility layers. You replace Apple's libraries with them at compile time, and obtain a native binary or the target platform.

This project is akin to Wine. It allows to run OS X binaries on Linux, without recompiling.

The Cocotron blog hasn't been updated in a while, but the project is still alive: http://code.google.com/p/cocotron/source/list

United857• 13 years ago

Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893022

consonants• 13 years ago

Is this mature enough to run dosbox in wine compiled for OS X? I want to know how deep this rabbit hole can go.

mpyne• 13 years ago

Once you get DOSBox running don't forget to boot up Win 3.11.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Also 68k mac emulation, which one dude got to boot OS X...

jevinskie• 13 years ago

Before this there was maloader [0] which was capable enough to run Apple's CLI toolchain. Really quite simple shim code!

[0] https://github.com/shinh/maloader

braintalking• 13 years ago

I'm currently playing with OS X ML 10.8.4 on custom hardware; (btw slowest performance than other OSes, ram hungry [lots of eye candy thought ])

I find pretty interesting the UNIX terminal and X11 (Xquartz) where you can ssh to your remote box or vm with linux and load GUI apps locally while code is running in the remote box (like a sandbox).

Example command:...

ssh user@1.2.3.4 -X

iceweasel

...

and browser GUI will launch in your OSX (also work on linux) ( the magic is the parameter -X , i discovered that recently, very useful, hope it helps someone )

general_failure• 13 years ago

Surprised there are no comments about the icon. I think the icon is awesome (so geeeeeeky)!

_glass• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Étoilé [1] a Software Environment based on GNUstep, which was quite promising when I was last interested in it (2008)

[1] http://etoileos.com/

marklarr• 13 years ago

So, does this mean that objective-c (minus graphics) works? It'd be a pretty big deal to be able to setup a CI server for unit tests on a linux box, rather have having to get some alternative mac-in-the-cloud, or something else equally ridiculous

OS X emulation layer for Linux

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