Arie,
There are two issues: porting Wine (the binary loader) to non
x86, and porting Winelib to non x86.
As far as porting Wine, I think the consensus is that it's probably
not worth it, due to performance issues. If anyone wishes to do
this, though (espec for Alpha), Compaq has told me that they would be
willing to
release a free run time of their x86 emulator, so that this could
be done at high speeds. Ulrich also did a good deal of work on this.
As far as Winelib, I think the belief is that porting to a
non x86, Unix with X Windows should be fairly straightforward.
There will be a fair amount of work to find and remove all
of the unknown bugs with byte endianness and packing, but
the fundamental design and plan for Wine is to make this easy.
For non Unix and/or non X Windows systems (such as BeOS and
MacOS), it gets a little bit harder. BeOS seems to be much
harder because it is missing many systems calls that Wine
relies upon (Patrik is the expert on Be, and I believe
there is a web page dedicated to Wine on BeOS). MacOS <= 9
is similarly hard.
MacOS X, however, is another story. If you get an X server on
MacOS X, it should be pretty easy. If you want to do it
the right way, you'd need to develop a Carbon driver to parallel
the Wine x11 driver. That, while conceptually straightforward,
will be a lot of work.
Hope this help,
Jeremy
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> What is your opinion about the above subject, especially in the sense that
> it may
> provide a good incentive for application developers to build their projects
> using winelib and gain
> a sort of platform independent code ?
>
> Arie Tal
