Michael Cohen wrote:
>
> Guys,
>
> I've been pondering this one for a while now. If endianness is
> accounted for, can WINE be ported to different architectures / operating
> systems? WINE should be configured from the ground up with ifdefs in place,
> but I don't imagine that anyone was considering porting it when it was
> written. I can try and start a development team to port it, however. The
> first steps must come from the wine devel teams at large. WINE needs to be
> prepared to port. I would love to see a future with WINE as the sole
> windows interpreter for Win32, MacOS, LinuxPPC, Linux/Alpha, etc.
Michael,
Wine (the binary loader) doesn't make sense to port to a non intel
platform, unless you have a really high performance x86 emulator
(and even then the rationale is a bit dicey).
Winelib (the Windows implementation and porting library) has been
ported to PPC once by Gavriel State, and has been again by Josh Dubois
of CodeWeavers [okay, Josh only has it sorta kinda working, but there
you go].
There is still a fair amount of work to do to get the non intel Winelib
working well, but it's only that - work - nothing really hard left <g>.
(Okay, that's glib. There are some real issues. For example,
you have a dilema about whether resources have a MS binary format
or a format that allows fields to be accessed via fields in a
structure).
With Winelib to PPC in hand, Winelib to most other platforms should be
straight forward.
So, yes, Winelib can be the key instrument to bringing Windows software
across many platforms. At least it darn well better be <g>.
Jer
