LWN: Comments on "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux"

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

thumperward — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 08:40:27 +0000

See osxcross (https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross).

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

ashkulz — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 13:25:22 +0000

You can use vagrant for running under Linux, see https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging which produces binaries for Windows, macOS and multiple Linux distributions from a single Linux machine.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

rillian — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 15:34:54 +0000

These days Mozilla cross-compiles Firefox for macOS, but there's still a large pile of minis for running tests. They use normal clang+llvm and a port of Apple's cctools, built by these scripts from these sources.

One still needs a mac to install xcode and obtain a copy of the macOS SDK, and to sign binaries for distribution. Maybe that will be something Darling will help with.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

mathstuf — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:21:39 +0000

Do you have links to docs and/or guides for doing the cross-compiling to macOS from Linux?

A quick search shows imcross, but that seems quite outdated and uses GCC, not an Xcode-like toolchain.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

mathstuf — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:18:25 +0000

Why would building be even sketchier? Personally, I'm interested in this as a way to containerize our macOS builds (then shipping the build trees to a macOS box for actual testing) since getting hermetic, reproducible macOS builds isn't possible until Apple cares enough to implement containers for their platform.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

thumperward — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:12:45 +0000

Carbon was also available for 32-bit Intel. It's also not the case that Carbon is exclusively a backwards compatibility thing: the OS X Finder used Carbon until like OS X 10.6.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

nilsmeyer — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 12:40:45 +0000

MacOS 8 and 9 compatibility? Aren't those strictly PowerPC?

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

BirAdam — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 11:59:51 +0000

There are projects like GNU Step that have some similarity to the macOS environment, and once upon a time there was Étoilé which aimed to be source compatible with macOS. GNU Step and Étoilé never became too popular, but I suppose some parts might be easier than one would imagine.

Anyway, development on macOS is happening so quickly now that I doubt any project like this would really ever be that useful. macOS releases happen every year. This is kind of like Windows too. WINE has had a hard go of it because Microsoft changes Windows in major ways quite often now. In the XP days, things were a bit easier and WINE came a very long way in that time because Windows was stable and unchanging for a very long time. Now, things are changing briskly. Most of the major compatibility gains have been due to Valve, ReactOS, and WINE all working toward compatibility. I doubt we will ever see many people needing/wanting macOS software working on Linux.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

thumperward — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 09:11:18 +0000

You can already cross-compile to macos targets on Linux (to an extent). This is more about the sort of things Wine does: firstly, permitting proprietary macos applications to run on Linux, and secondly, bridging the development gap so that developers who wish to port existing macos applications to Linux have an easier time of it.

It doesn't solve the problem of needing a cupboard full of Mac Minis to actually test macos builds, for the same reason that it isn't really adequate to test Windows builds by running them on a Linux box via Wine.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

k8to — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 01:15:10 +0000

You can't really test Mac applications in this environment.

Mac applications break in all kinds of ways across minor macosx versions. Vetting them in this environment wound tell you very little.

Building would be even sketchier. You need the entire system library set, not just a compatability layer.

Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux

bovinespirit — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 22:39:38 +0000

Building Mac applications on Linux is huge! Mozilla apparently has a huge number of MiniMacs for building and testing, and I imagine many other projects do too. Lovely as MiniMacs are they are not designed or built for server farms so moving at least some of the work onto purpose built Linux servers would be a win.

On the downside I would imagine that because Darling relies on a Kernel plugin it can't run inside a container on a standard Linux distro.