← Back to context

Comment by aggling

1 day ago

That is irrelevant to the feasibility of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.

WINE has been reimplementing the Win32 ABI (not API) for decades. It already works pretty well; development has been driven by both volunteers and commercial developers (CodeWeavers) for a long time.

  • There are many programs that still do not work properly in WINE, even though it has been developed for decades. This in itself demonstrates the infeasibility of reimplementing Win32 as a stable interface on par with Windows. The result after all this effort is still patchy and incomplete.

    • There are many programs that do not work properly in Windows 11, so using Windows to run Windows programs doesn't work either.

It's already been done, though. Wine has been around for 30 years and has excellent compatibility at this point.

  • 5341 of the 16491 applications listed in the Wine AppDB have a compatibility rating of "garbage". This is not excellent compatibility.