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

[Craig Andrews <nospam [at] fishbot.free-online.co.uk>]

I just realised what you said here :-)

Wine isn't anything like vmware. In fact, it's so totally different that
they can hardly be compared.

Vmware is a VM, it simulates a machine on which an ACTUAL OS can run, so
you really are running Windows.

Wine, however, is not. With Wine, you use a library which translates Win32
API calls to X11 equivelants (read the wine README, thats what it
says!) In actual fact, Wine is not an API. It is a wrapper and a filter.

You cannot develop Win32 programs under Linux. You can only run
precompiled binaries using said wrapper and filter. From every respect you
look at it, it is not an API. The only time it will become an API is when
a) kernel support for Windows binaries is available (is it already ?)
b) wine can be used as a development library, not just runtime
c) gcc can compile win32 binaries.

Only then will wine be an API 

Craig Andrews
craig@fishbot.free-online.co.uk

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> 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.

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