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Comment by sbinnee | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know about WoW64 mode. I remember when trying to install an old windows program I had to install a bunch of 32-bit translation library for audio and stuff. This WoW64 means that I can just simply use 64-bit arch. This is fabulous.

WoW64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

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I remember I was using Gentoo when I first tried WoW64. I tried it because I didn't feel like compiling all those 32bit libraries. And it turned out that Wine's WoW64 mode worked just fine. It was really handy.

It's a bit different. WoW64 is the technology used to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Windows. Wine has support WoW64 for a long time. The difference is the "old" wine WoW64 mode required 32-bit libraries on the host side, whereas this "new" WoW64 mode doesn't.

Is the MacOS equivalent what was deprecated in Catalina, ending compatibility with 32-bit applications?

Crossover maintained compatibility with 32-bit windows applications even after Catalina.

> https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrati...

Which is kind of funny because yet again windows was a better application in terms of longevity than MacOS native.

It's a bit different. WOW64 is a compatibility layer that intercepts calls into system libraries from 32-bit apps and translates them into calls to 64-bit libraries. macOS shipped both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all system libraries, no translation involved.

Seems like also 16bit apps????

Yes, as of Wine 10.16 (the version number is a lucky coincidence!) 16-bit Windows applications can run on 64-bit Linux without any special libraries.

Apparently the real WOW64 doesn’t, but WINE’s version of it does. Wow indeed.

So Microsoft continues to support something that is presumably harder to maintain than Apple just continuing to ship existing 32-bit libraries?

I’m not very familiar with the Windows side, but it sounds harder to create but easier to maintain. Once the 32->64 translation shims are implemented, you’re done. They’ll keep working. If you’re not adding new 32-bit APIs then there’s no more work to be done. Maintaining a parallel set of libraries means each change has to work on both targets.

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