Comment by messe
3 years ago
How is it hand-wavy?
> 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.
It's the exact same way its used by FreeBSD for its linux compatibility layer. It's the same way that Wine even uses in their FAQ.
> 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.
> [...]
> "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.
The problem with this definition is that it's so broad it encompasses many many things that are never talked about as “emulators”. By this definition, Docker is an emulator, a VM is an emulator, an x86_64 CPU is an emulator (because it “emulates“, in the broadest sense, x86), a C compiler is an emulator (“emulating” the PDP-11 on modern hardware), etc.
Even your own quote reveals the issue:
> > 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
Yet nobody talks about the latest Windows as being an emulator for older windows …
In short, this definition is akin to defining humans as “bipeds without feather”, we definitely fit this definition but it's way too broad to be useful.