[OT] YDL 4.0

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. Blaylock:

At the risk of prolonging a very long discussion... :-)

J.T.Blaylock wrote:
> Programs in running WINE aren't really running natively.

Actually, I thought the secret of WINE was that the programs *were* 
running natively ("WINE Is Not an Emulator," and all that). My 
impression was that WINE mimicked the relevant Windows APIs, letting the 
program think that it was running on a Microsoft (spit) Windows system.

> Sure, the CPU instructions are the same, but its an OS
> inside an OS, like the OS X Classic environment or MOL.

Again, I may be misunderstanding you, but I always pictured WINE as 
being more like a Java virtual machine than like an emulated OS. If so, 
then it should be possible (not necessarily easy, mind you, but 
possible) to port WINE to PowerPC. However, I am not a microprocessor 
guru by any means, and I could easily be wrong.

> People won't go for that, I think. If OS X was released
> for x86 tomorrow, there would be no programs to run on it.

At present, people begrudgingly use Virtual PC to run the occasional 
Windows program on the Mac. However, I agree with you that few people do 
so by choice. I also agree with you that porting Mac OS X to x86 would 
be a disaster, since, as you correctly point out, few (or no) existing 
programs would run without recompilation and, likely, refactoring.

> People would not want to recompile Linux apps for OS X,
> even in the cases where it is possible.

But, people do this all the time! Look at the Fink Project:

<http://fink.sourceforge.net/>

3880 packages as of yesterday! They don't all *look* like Mac OS X 
applications, but they sure work just fine.

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>