Comment by WarChortle
3 years ago
In case you weren't aware Wine is not an emulator, it is a compatibility layer.
The whole point of wine is to take a native Windows app, only compiled for Windows and translate its Windows calls to Linux calls.
3 years ago
In case you weren't aware Wine is not an emulator, it is a compatibility layer.
The whole point of wine is to take a native Windows app, only compiled for Windows and translate its Windows calls to Linux calls.
> In case you weren't aware Wine is not an emulator, it is a compatibility layer.
Ehhh. I know it’s in the name, but I feel like the significance is debatable. It’s not a CPU emulator, true. It is emulating calls, which is emulation of a sort.
Usually when you say "emulator" people think there's an inherent performance hit because of a fetch-decode-execute interpreter loop somewhere. Reimplementations of things don't have that performance hit even though they are lumped under the same umbrella as actual interpreters and recompilers.
Related note: if WINE is an emulator why isn't Linux or GNU? They both reimplement parts of UNIX, which was even more proprietary than Windows is today.
Nowadays it's emulators all the way down.
On most of these architectures the software eventually executes as x86 machine code, and the distance between x86 machine code and the actual processes inside a modern CPU implementing the x86 code set is so vast you can call a modern CPU an "x86 emulator built in hardware."
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> If WINE is an emulator why isn't Linux or GNU?
I mean, it depends on the context. I don't think it would be wrong to say that Linux "emulates a UNIX environment" or some such, which is closer to what OP actually wrote about Wine.
You've probably used a "terminal emulator" at some point today. ;)
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> if WINE is an emulator why isn't Linux or GNU?
They... are? I mean for that matter Intel/AMD instruction sets are CISC emulators on top of RISC silicon.
UNIX source code, at least for the original versions, was released in 2002: https://slashdot.org/story/02/01/24/0146248/caldera-releases...
In regular joe-schmo parlance, an emulator would be something that translates a hardware machine into software that is run on a different machine. Hardware being the important word here. Performance has nothing to do with how people use the term emulator in regular parlance.
It’s a reimplementation of the APIs rather than an emulation. Same as how Linux reimplemented UNIX APIs, but it’s not a UNIX emulator.
That's still emulating the underlying API, and accepted usage of the word. Much like the FreeBSD linux emulator translates linux syscalls into FreeBSD ones.
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I think most people interpret emulation as CPU emulation, not a compatibility layer otherwise .NET core is probably just one fat emulator.
I hate to break to to those people, but that approach to emulation is only used for very old systems. Once you get into 32 bit, it’s mostly HLE.
By that definition, wouldn't the whole of POSIX simply be an "emulation layer" ;-)
It is not a "Windows Emulator", but it is certainly a "Windows Userspace Emulator"
Dolphin can run Wii binaries on top of Linux, by emulating a Wii.
Wine can run Windows binaries on top of Linux, by emulating Windows Userspace.
Why would one be an emulator, and the other is not?
Is there some distinction in what an emulator is that goes against common sense?
This reminds of the Transpiler/Compiler "debate." They're both still compilers. They're both emulators (VMs & Compatability Layers).
What the creators meant to say, IMO, is WINVM, "Wine is not a Virtual Machine".
Wine is more like a re-implementation of windows Userland using a different kernel (and graphics libraries).
Since the hardware is all the same, there is nothing to emulate or compile.
Or from the other direction - windows NT contains a re-implementation of the win16 API. Is that an emulator?
The creators also would not call virtual machines emulators because they don't translate CPU instructions, which is their narrow criteria for "emulator" that nobody else seems to use.
> is their narrow criteria for "emulator" that nobody else seems to use.
Except the people actually writing or talking about real “emulators”. You know, for things like NES or Gameboy on x86, x86 on WASM, etc.
Sure, you can argue that VMs or Wine are emulators in the broadest sense, but then I could argue that your CPU is an emulator too since it doesn't really runs ASM, and with that very loose meaning almost anything computers related is an emulator. And in practice that's never what people mean when we're talking about an emulator. (Even this thread started with the wrong postulate that WINE must have incurred a performance penalty because the commented believed it was an emulator).
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The Wii emulator is emulating the whole system including the CPU; WINE describes itself as not an emulator specifically because it's not doing anything about the CPU (hence not working on ARM Linux without extra work).
(I'm not 100% sold on this; I think "CPU emulator" and "ABI emulator" are both reasonable descriptions, albeit of different things, but that's the distinction that the WINE folks are making.)
By any well-known definition of an emulator, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator, Wine is an emulator. It's emulating a Windows system to Windows programs. It's not emulating hardware is all. That WINE acronym, other than being a slightly annoying way to correct people, is wrong. Reminds me of Jimmy Neutron smartly calling table salt "sodium chloride" when really he's less correct than the layman he's talking to, since there are additives.
WINE should simply stand for WINdows Emulator.
According to the Wikipedia link given, emulation is for host and target computer systems. In a computing context, 'emulate' is not a synonym for 'impersonate' - it describes an approach for a goal.
Wine does not aim to emulate a "Windows computer system" (aka a machine which booted into Windows). For instance, it doesn't allow one to run windows device drivers. WINE is taking an approach that ultimately means it is doing a subset of what is possible with full emulation (hopefully in return going much faster).
To put it another way, a mobile phone app with a HP49 interface that understands RPN is not necessarily a calculator emulator. It could just be an app that draws a calculator interface and understands RPN and some drawing commands. It doesn't necessarily have the capability to run firmwares or user binaries written for the Saturn processor.
The people who wrote Wine thought it was an emulator. Their first idea for a name was "winemu" but they didn't like that, then thought to shorten it to "wine".
The "Wine is not an emulator" suggestion was first made in 1993, not because Wine is not an emulator but because there was concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems.
Eventually that was accepted as an alternative meaning to the name. The Wine FAQ up until late 1997 said "The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best".
The release notes called it an emulator up through release 981108: "The is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator".
The next release changed that to "This is release 981211 of Wine, free implementation of Windows on Unix".
As far as I've been able to tell, there were two reasons they stopped saying it was an emulator.
First, there were two ways you could use it. You could use it the original way, as a Windows emulator on Unix to run Windows binaries. But if you had the source to a Windows program you could you could compile that source on Unix and link with libraries from Wine. That would give you a real native Unix binary. In essence this was using Wine as Unix app framework.
Second most people who would be likely to use Wine had probably only ever encountered emulators before that were emulating hardware. For example there was Virtual PC from Connectix for Mac, which came out in 1997, and there were emulators on Linux for various old 8-bit systems such as NES and Apple II.
Those emulators were doing CPU emulation and that was not fast in those days. It really only worked acceptably well if you were emulating hardware that had been a couple of orders of magnitude slower than your current computer.
Continuing to say that Wine is an emulator would likely cause many people to think it must be slow too and so skip it.
One might say it emulates windows library and system calls.
Or they might say that it translates windows library and system calls.
Same way a CPU emulator translates instructions.
Much like one could say it internets Windows userland and system calls with Linux and its userland.
No, not at all like that. One slight difference is that what you said is complete nonsense.
I'm using an accepted definition of emulation:
> emulate (transitive verb)
> To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.
This usage is pretty common, for example FreeBSD has a linux emulation layer that takes Linux syscalls and translates them into FreeBSD syscalls. WINE saying it stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" is irrelevant to the fact that it is blatantly is one.
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A lot of high level emulation works this way as well. And, similarly, FPGA cores often aren't "simulating game hardware" either.
Surely you see that this is a slight semantic distinction, unless you consider Wine apps to be Linux native?