Comment by rhet0rica
17 hours ago
A lot of these questions are answered here: https://ravynos.com/faq
To summarize...
There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/
The goal for ravynOS is to be analogous to ReactOS. Much like ReactOS and WINE, ravynOS and Darling share a lot of Cocoa code.
For the problem of OpenStep implementations specifically, a bespoke software stack has the benefit of being able to put Mach messaging into the kernel, where it is much more performant.
They chose the FreeBSD kernel over Darwin for the sake of hardware compatibility (though of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time...)
There is also overlap with GNUstep, helloSystem, and other projects in the broader "open-source Mac/NeXT" space, though ravynOS (obviously) prefers BSD/MIT/Apache-style licensing over GNU-style licensing. Nevertheless, ravynOS currently uses the GNUstep libobjc2 runtime, a bit like how most of the Unix world used to depend on gcc.
> There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/
Missed opportunity to call it Cider.
There's already been a Cider; it used some Wine code to ease porting games to MacOS.
For reasons that I do not understand, the company behind Cider pivoted to real estate investing, and got out of the tech field entirely
> of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time...
actually the broader Mach kernel, not specifically the NeXT variant, is the one with a documented history of extensive portability
The NeXT variant did run on the following architectures:
1. Motorola 68k (the original NeXT hardware had 68030 and 68040 chips)
2. Intel x86 (NeXTSTEP 3.1 for Intel was released in 1993)
3. HP PA-RISC (I have an OPENSTEP 4.2 CD that can run on Motorola 68k, x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC hardware)
4. Sun SPARC
5. 32-bit PowerPC (Rhapsody, the original Mac OS X 1.0 that was essentially still Rhapsody, and of course Mac OS X from Cheetah through Leopard)
6. 64-bit PowerPC (Power Mac G5 and iMac G5)
7. Intel x86-64 (starting from Mac OS X Tiger all the way to macOS Tahoe)
8. 32-bit ARM (iOS on early iPhones with 32-bit ARM chips)
9. 64-bit ARM
I could be forgetting other platforms, but these are the ones I know from the top of my head.