Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: PPCs can't WINE... (wrong, kinda)
Author: Eric Kidd Posted: 5/14/1999; 12:48:13 PM Topic: Linux' wide open spaces Msg #: 6237 (In response to 6234) Prev/Next: 6236 / 6238
This document does not say a thing about how to port Wine to non-386 operating systems, though. You would need a CPU emulator. Let's get Wine into a better shape on 386 first, OK?WINE is written in C, with a little bit of assembly. Windows applications, on the other hand, are generally distributed as Intel binaries.
There's no obvious reason why you couldn't take the source to a Windows application (written mostly in C), WINE's implementation of Win32 (written mostly in C), and bring everything up on the PowerPC, the Alpha or another architecture. You would have to rewrite a little bit of assembly code, of course, and maybe hack a Visual C++ extension or two into GCC.
Now, this might not be a worthwhile project. But if someone offered you five million dollars to port your application to SPARC/Solaris (so they could run it on their 64-processor Enterprise 10k with a terrabyte of disk, for example), I don't see why you'd have any trouble.
From my perspective, WINE looks like the best way to port a Windows application to Linux. It lets you hit the largest, fastest-growing group of Linux users with the smallest amount of effort. Plus, you only have to maintain a single code base, and you benefit from all of Corel's work on WINE.
Cheers, Eric
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