Wine on Apple Silicon?

[MisterMe]

So... eventually, Rosetta 2 will be gone. What will be of Wine then?

WINE and Rosetta 2 have two complementary but different jobs. Rosetta 2 emulates Intel processors. Period. Full stop. WINE is a clone of Windows APIs. It allows Windows applications to run under other operating systems without using Microsoft software. On your Mac, a Windows application looks kinda sorta like a Mac application.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Wine is already not really full functional on Catalina and Big Sur since it relies on 32-bit support. Should Wine lose all 32-bit dependencies and support just 64-bit Windows, it is perfectly possible that it could work, yes

This actually isn't true anymore, Codeweavers found a workaround for Crossover. You can do it in non-Crossover (free) editions of Wine as well (like https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer/releases/tag/V1.8.4), but you have to disable SIP.

 

[KPOM]

Wine is already not really full functional on Catalina and Big Sur since it relies on 32-bit support. Should Wine lose all 32-bit dependencies and support just 64-bit Windows, it is perfectly possible that it could work, yes

Codeweavers Crossover supports 32-bit applications on Catalina. They essentially added a Rosetta-like layer to translate 32-bit calls to 64-bit calls. Obviously adding another layer would hit performance, but it could be possible. The developer says they have the DTK, but won’t yet commit to a working version by the time the first Macs with Apple Silicon actually ship.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Codeweavers Crossover supports 32-bit applications on Catalina. They essentially added a Rosetta-like layer to translate 32-bit calls to 64-bit calls.

Nitpick, you seem to be implying that Crossover is doing binary translation (ie "emulation"). I won't pretend I understand exactly what's going on, but my understanding is that this is absolutely not the case. The 32bit x86 code is getting natively executed as x86 code by the Intel processor, which means there's very little performance impact versus even a tightly-optimized emulator like Rosetta.

 

[casperes1996]

For "regular" applications, transpiled code can be cached, enabling fast startup

More than just temporary caching; It'll write the ARM instructions into the binary, just like if it were a universal binary - For Mac App Store apps and apps using the Installer it'll happen at install time, for others on first launch. This should follow the .app bundle even. But the transpiled instructions might not be as optimised as if the compiler was given the full source code to create the instructions from the AST rather than from a series of x86 instructions, so there's still reason to compile for ARM yourself.

But excellent post you did; I'm doing my course on compilers now myself 🙂

 

[BarbaricCo]

More than just temporary caching; It'll write the ARM instructions into the binary, just like if it were a universal binary - For Mac App Store apps and apps using the Installer it'll happen at install time, for others on first launch. This should follow the .app bundle even. But the transpiled instructions might not be as optimised as if the compiler was given the full source code to create the instructions from the AST rather than from a series of x86 instructions, so there's still reason to compile for ARM yourself.

But excellent post you did; I'm doing my course on compilers now myself 🙂

For anyone interested in how Codeweavers make Wine run 32-bit Windows apps on Catalina here is the more technical info

So We Don't Have a Solution for Catalina...Yet | CodeWeavers Blog

By Jana Schmid | But we do have is an explanation of the technical curveballs we’ve been thrown, the progress we have made, the time we see fit for us to release a CrossOver compatible Catalina, guidance for you from our support team and a gesture of goodwill if our produc

www.codeweavers.com

 

[KPOM]

For anyone interested in how Codeweavers make Wine run 32-bit Windows apps on Catalina here is the more technical info

So We Don't Have a Solution for Catalina...Yet | CodeWeavers Blog

By Jana Schmid | But we do have is an explanation of the technical curveballs we’ve been thrown, the progress we have made, the time we see fit for us to release a CrossOver compatible Catalina, guidance for you from our support team and a gesture of goodwill if our produc

www.codeweavers.com

Based on that, it appears they would need another workaround to get 32-bit code operating on Apple Silicon since Rosetta 2 doesn’t translate 32-bit instructions.

 

[BarbaricCo]

Based on that, it appears they would need another workaround to get 32-but code operating on Apple Silicon since Rosetta 2 doesn’t translate 32-bit instructions.

Yup. Intel chips still have 32bit instructions set even is MacOs is pure 64-bit.
We will see, those are creative people 😄