Excuse you, wine ISN'T emulation, it's literally in the name W.ine I.s N.ot an E.mulator >.>
/j I knew exactly what you mean and it doesn't matter, I'm just being silly
Excuse you, wine ISN'T emulation, it's literally in the name W.ine I.s N.ot an E.mulator >.>
/j I knew exactly what you mean and it doesn't matter, I'm just being silly
I think the name initially referred to WINdows Emulator and was later changed, though I can't find a good source for it. I wonder why they insist on not calling it an emulator.
Huh, that'd be super interesting, given that'd be a complete about face!
And I think from a technical perspective it's actually not one? I'm not totally positive. I've usually heard it called an compatibility layer, which I think would be different from the way an emulator typically emulates a piece of hardware and its firmware
Could also have something to do with not wanting to draw the ire of Microsoft? "Emulator" kinda feels like it'd come with different implications or connotations than calling it a compatibility layer 🤷♂️
There is a lot of confusion about this, particularly caused by people getting Wine's name wrong and calling it WINdows Emulator.
When users think of an emulator, they tend to think of things like game console emulators or virtualization software. However, Wine is a compatibility layer - it runs Windows applications in much the same way Windows does. There is no inherent loss of speed due to "emulation" when using Wine, nor is there a need to open Wine before running your application.
That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.
A few things make Wine more than just an emulator:
Sections of Wine can be used on Windows. Some virtual machines use Wine's OpenGL-based implementation of Direct3D on Windows rather than truly emulate 3D hardware. Winelib can be used for porting Windows application source code to other operating systems that Wine supports to run on any processor, even processors that Windows itself does not support. "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.
—https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ
Oh awesome, thanks for sharing!
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