RE: [Sheflug] Re: TopPage info for Sheffield Linux User Group

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 19 May 2000, Paul Sims wrote:

> I think from the example of Corel Office2000 that making the Win code 
> wine-friendly is seen as a quick alternative to native porting.

I'm not sure why you think this is necessarily a bad idea?

> reasons for backing wine development then become obvious. Wine itself is 
> still less than perfect, and having an optimised package is dangerously 
> close to a major fork in the code. Of course, as a GPL product they are 
> perfectly entitled to do this, but what are the consequences for systems 
> already running wine ?

It doesn't matter if they fork the code; the Wine guys can then just fold
the changes back into their branch. 

> A native codebase would of course have to adhere to Unix/Linux standards so 
> the sloppy practices of Windows would be avoided (and a new set of sloppy 
> Linux practices put in it's place, no doubt), not to mention the 
> duplication of effort.

But Wine *is* a native codebase. In exactly the same manner vmware is.
We're not talking about emulation here; we're talking API layers. Like
GTK, QT, etc... the differences aren't as great as you might imagine. Of
course, there are things which the Wine code would have to jump through
hoops to do; but then, Windows programming is a different paradigm to most
Linux practices, so it's not surprising.

> If  Windows-developed  apps are specifically targeted as cross-platform 
> along with a stable Wine, then we benefit by the availablity of popular 
> packages. However, I don't see it being as good a solution as a native app 
> running without another software layer between it and the OS.

I really don't think that the Wine layer is going to put that much of a
performance hit it. If it looks slow, it's probably been compiled -g. I
would think that throwing all graphical operations down 127.0.0.1 would be
a bigger hit..

Cheers,

Alex.


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