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Comment by joshumax | Hacker News Reader

I was only around at Codeweavers for a part of this huge undertaking, and only contributed a small part of the 32-on-64 MacOS patchset, but I must say this was one of the most impressive feats I've seen coordinated using mainly nothing but email and IRC for communication.

Everything from thunking layers to calling conventions to inline assembly in the Wine codebase had to be redesigned for this release of Wine; an absolutely massive proposition. Ideas such as dynamic binary translation and running Win32 executables in the MacOS hypervisor framework were considered, and some ideas I tried while hacking Wine gave me insight into other projects I hack on such as Qemu and LLVM.

In short; props to everyone who worked on this! It was a long time in the process!

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The Codeweaver folks are really great. I worked with one of their engineer's brother, which is how I can to discover this local (for me) company. The Linux version of WINE really shines too. They track, fix, and give back to the open source project while taking care of all the setup, etc. Ironically, a Win95 Garmin GPS simulator (airplane instrument) worked lovely on their kit... while it would not work on the 'run as' on Windows 7.

I've got their OSX version as well. There was a day where I needed Visio at work, and that would let me launch a Windows bottle. Funny enough, it also ran quite a few steam games... back before there were solid OSX ports for what I'd play.

I find it marvelous you can reliably use software 24 years later. And we talk about binaries, not sources. And we talk about software still with business uses.

The original storage media may be corrupted but the software lives!

My personal belief is Wine will stand next and maybe above the GNU project, the Linux kernel, the QEMU emulator and the GIT version management as the best things ever made by free software.

Did you see this from previous Christmases? https://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2018/ (change the last digit to 6 or 4 to see previous Advent calendars) I think we have to wait 'til next year for the next one.

They're pretty great, and do a great job showing off the many platforms it can emulate, in a way that feels and rewards like a treasure hunt.

> running Win32 executables in the MacOS hypervisor framework

Interesting, why was this discarded? Performance reasons? Or the API not being satisfactory?

Presumably performance. At that point just use Virtualbox/VMWare.

How long will it exist?

IDK, a long time I'd suppose?

The oldest programs I can use reliably are win32 inside wine.

It may not be what you think is technically the best, but office 2007 works well and many games and other specialized too. The office license is cheap and does most of what I need.

Someone mentionned below, a perpetual license of Mathematica for MacOSX will be useless in a year, because of the deprecation. Their mistake was not buying the Windows version.

That's why I still buy win32 software to this day. Their binaries will work on anything for a long time.

I think they mean:

> How long will [the MacOS hypervisor framework] exist?

I think this is right. But I don't see any reason to believe the hypervisor APIs are in danger, unless I'm missing something.

That’s a great point! I’m bummed about 32bit ports of old games that won’t work anymore.

There must be open source editors available that have feature parity with 12yo software.

Wine opens many new usecases. You realize the software rot myth was created by bad API deprecation pratices.

Think how different the market becomes when consumers can keep using a 12 years old license. You need to introduce fantastic new features to get my money. Changing the font, the menu and the colors won't do.

Even if it is free - why should I bother to learn this new software? The old license did cost me $5. If I misplace it, I can buy another for the same amount instead of paying year to year. And to this day it works reliably on every operating system I use.

Well, then get to work.

Dethroning MS Office is going to be a long, hard battle, and it seems like not very many people are interested in fighting it.

> nothing but email and IRC

But? Those are both extremely capable communication mechanisms.

I read "nothing but email and IRC" to mean "without in-person meetings" as opposed to "without more capable communications tools".

Or without voice chat.

Although coding over voice/video chat isn’t fun.

Exactly. When people are motivated to work together, even poor communication tools are adequate. But these are excellent communication tools.

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