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How Wine works 101

werat.dev

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Re: How Wine works 101

#61

Post by lmm »

haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

What kind of applications are they? I've had very much the opposite experience.

Re: How Wine works 101

#62

Post by anyfoo »

anyfoo wrote: post #47
gerdesj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux will shortly remove support for DECNet. That's deprecating something responsibly. Your SimCity example was an easy win and yet more wankery. They have not put a huge amount of work in compatibility. MS have done just enough always and only enough. That is precisely what a large commercial business would do and they did.

I'm saying this as someone who does not care about Windows (or Microsoft) at all, and hasn't been using Windows besides maybe in a vm once a year for at least a decade now: To say they have done "just enough always and only enough" is massively underselling it to a level where it's basically wrong. Everyone who has been following Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog for some time knows the massive, quite impressive,…

Moreover (replying to myself here), compatibility was explicitly stated as a goal. Keeping existing software running got people to upgrade to the new OS (at a time where almost every major OS version had to be bought), and to not abandon the OS line for another incompatible one. Back when there was no "web" as a unifying platform.

So yes, of course that was based on business and likely no other reason. People after all will certainly argue that at lot of the cruft makes things worse, not better; it took a long time to get rid of most of MS-DOS for one thing, and I bet there's still mountains of other ancient remnants that get in the way.

But to say that MS has not put "a huge amount of work [into] compatibility" is just distorting history. For better or for worse, compatibility seemed to have been one of the core principles for quite some time.

Re: How Wine works 101

#64

Post by Arainach »

monocasa wrote: post #42
pizza234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

'Recently' meaning about the past 10 years or so. Windows 8 broke a lot of software for me that runs in Wine.

[[Citation Needed]]. Other than 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows, do you have an example?

Re: How Wine works 101

#65

Post by sandworm101 »

tmccrary55 wrote: post #41
pizza234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

historically You're not wrong but we're in a whole new game these days.

And the pendulum will swing back. In a few years MS may go back to its old tricks. Nothing that company does has ever been consistent from one decade to the next. For anything expected to "just work" for more than a handful of years, MS is not a reliable partner.

Re: How Wine works 101

#66

Post by asveikau »

Matl wrote: post #12
amelius wrote: post #8

Any WINE-like projects out there but for MacOS/iOS (as opposed to Windows)?

https://github.com/darlinghq/darling but it's very early.

> but it's very early

I thought I remember hearing about the project a long time ago. First commit of README is 2012.

Re: How Wine works 101

#67

Post by monocasa »

Arainach wrote: post #64
monocasa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Recently' meaning about the past 10 years or so. Windows 8 broke a lot of software for me that runs in Wine.

[[Citation Needed]]. Other than 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows, do you have an example?

A lot of games, Red Alert 2 off the top of my head. Never got it running even in compatibility mode and changing the bit depth.

Re: How Wine works 101

#68

Post by shiomiru »

saghm wrote: post #57
Kye wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big wine glass on the project's website. I don't get the impression the association bothers them.

I think GP just meant that it can be ambiguous which one is meant (especially in the context of headlines like this); I'd imagine that even if it were always cased WINE it would still be pretty easily associated with the drink.

The only annoying part of the name is getting beverage-related search results when looking up error messages; but upper-casing it would probably not help much there.

Re: How Wine works 101

#69

Post by arrakeen »

> In the last year I’ve spent quite some time working on a debugger capable of debugging both the Wine layer and the Windows application running with it.

looking forward to this. every attempt i've made to debug a misbehaving program in wine has left me extremely frustrated with the debugger

Re: How Wine works 101

#70

Post by kgeist »

monocasa wrote: post #67
Arainach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[[Citation Needed]]. Other than 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows, do you have an example?

A lot of games, Red Alert 2 off the top of my head. Never got it running even in compatibility mode and changing the bit depth.

According to Raymond Chen, this usually happens when software relies on undocumented APIs or undefined behavior. When Windows removes undocumented APIs or changes behavior not covered by the documentation, such apps break and people blame Microsoft. For example, I remember one app used to programmatically find some kind of "Print" menu in Windows' desktop environment and call it to implement printing functionality. When Microsoft changed the UI of the desktop (shuffled the menu items around) the app broke and people immediately blamed Microsoft, even though the app is to blame because the exact location of the menu item was never supposed to be a public contract. If an app is a widely used one, Microsoft usually used to create "shims" which detected funky behavior like that and corrected it to make the app work again. I think they don't do it anymore after Windows 8, that's why apps started breaking more frequently.
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