Hacker News Reader

Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick: Wine is as much a windows emulator as xterm is a terminal emulator.

xterm is a terminal emulator. It has to pass a compliance test suite that ensures it correctly replicates the behavior of DEC terminals up through the VT220 (plus some VT320 features). Programs that do this at the protocol level have been called "terminal emulators" since forever ago; even 70s and 80s vintage physical terminals have been said to "emulate" other makes of terminal by interpreting their wire protocols.

It's all the other "terminals" for Linux, especially the libvt ones, Kitty, and Alacritty, that are more like shitty xterm emulators.

Yes, correct, but to disprove my equation, you should show what Wine does differently to not meet the criteria to be called emulation.

Honest question: does xterm emulate teletypes by hooking in shared libraries and re-implementing functions? This is what I understand wine is doing

xterm hooks into the tty subsystem by creating a pseudoterminal, not into shared libraries. The handling of control sequences and the buffer is re-implemented in C.

Different kinds of emulators have different kinds of interfaces they emulate.

From `man xterm`:

    xterm - terminal emulator for X

From Wikipedia entry for Wine:

    Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator (...))

Neither wine nor xterm have virtualized cpu or memory, they both imitate (= emulate) some system via their interfaces, yet one is primarily an emulator and the other is not one. That does not make sense.

The wine project changed name to avoid the bad reputation emulators had back then due to their poor performance. "Wine is not an emulator" is not factually accurate, its a social workaround.

Words can have different meanings in different contexts. "Wine is not an emulator" was a very useful tagline to indicate that it was fast, as opposed to virtual machines like Virtual PC, PCTask etc.

"My bicycle is not a vehicle because it doesn't have a engine"

Actually "Wine is not an emulator" is factually correct.

Wine is a re-implementation of win32 on top of (near) POSIX OSes like Linux.

Then xterm isn't an emulator either, its a re-implementation of the DEC VT terminal protocol on top of a POSIX-like OS. Pick one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com