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The end goal isn't just using Windows for Windows sake, the reason people use Windows on mac hardware is to get access to apps that run on Windows. And most of
by txcwpalpha 6y ago
The end goal isn't just using Windows for Windows sake, the reason people use Windows on mac hardware is to get access to apps that run on Windows. And most of those apps still run like garbage (if at all) on the ARM versions of Windows.
- ianai 6y agoThey showed Maya (x86 binary) running on their Chip. It has some ability to run intel binaries on Apple silicon through at least two options-emulation and something that sounds like “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word.
- txcwpalpha 6y agoI think that is a slightly different use case, though. That demo was an x86 binary running on ARM MacOS via a translation layer. So if there is a MacOS x86 version of the app you want to run, that might be an option. But I know a lot of people still run Windows because they want the Windows version of an app, either because it isn't available at all on Mac or just because the Windows version runs better (Excel was a classic example of this for a long time, might still be). In that case, I don't know if that same translation layer will have the same performance (if it can run at all outside of MacOS) when running an entirely different OS.
- ianai 6y agoFWIW I remember running PowerPC binaries on Intel macs via Rosetta was pretty painless. They mentioned explicit support for linux/windows emulation so they know it’s an important use case.
- monocasa 6y agoThey did not mention windows emulation, only Linux/docker.
- justincormack 6y agoI don't believe Rosetta will work for linux/windows VMs.
- gwd 6y ago> “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word. I think this is called "transpiling" -- a version of compiling that's mainly translating from another architecture. And it didn't sound from their description like it was JIT -- it sounded like it would do the transpile when you first installed it (or maybe first ran it?) and keep the results.
- monocasa 6y agoTranspiling (as much as I hate that word, because the more you know about compilers, the more meaningless it is), is about source to source translations, not binary translation. And they have a first pass AOT, with a JIT backup from the sounds of it to support JITs like browsers, node, and java.