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Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoHi HN, I started developing an experimental project with the goal of running macOS CLI binaries natively on Linux ARM machines. As of now, we have working prototypes for: - 7-Zip: Passes multi-threaded compression tests on an 8k-file tree. Currently ~5.2x slower than native Linux execution, but I already mapped out a clear optimization plan to cut this gap down. - curl: Over 200 commands and options successfully pass our automated Docker test script. - Xcode Tools Git: Basic version control commands (init, add, commit) are up and running, though 100% stability is not yet guaranteed. I would be highly grateful for your constructive criticism, architectural ideas, and feedback! Thank you!
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoI assume you eventually plan to target binaries that don't already exist on Linux? Where do you think you'll start?
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoWell, of course, most of all I would like to achieve full-fledged support for Xcode Tools (including building iOS applications) and the macOS version of Homebrew. But, of course, there is still a lot of work ahead to get to this point. Thank you!
- iwontberude 2mo agoAnd it’s an endlessly moving target, look at how many apps break every major release (and use it to justify regular, expensive paid upgrades)
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoThat's true. But if we can achieve support for the current stable version, it will be much easier to add new features later or rework the ones that were replaced (unless Apple changes everything on purpose :)
- frumplestlatz 2mo agoHistorically, I’d say that the chances of this being successful are exceptionally low given how large the ABI surface is — and it will wildly change out from underneath you on a near yearly cadence. Perhaps LLMs change that calculation. I really couldn’t say.
- RossBencina 2mo agoI'm curious: how large is it really? As I understand it, Kakehashi is targeting command line programs, especially Xcode-tools. How much non-POSIX/Mach/BSD interface do Mac command line programs use? How much of that is not already open source. How much of that changes yearly? The only thing that comes to mind is process security for codesign and notarization but I'm just guessing.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoThe Xcode Tools are written by Apple to run on Macs; they have no reason to avoid internal APIs, and when dealing with App Store-related concerns, they probably do use them heavily.
- dmix 2mo agoEven React Native tools used by tons of companies struggle to keep up with Xcode build tool changes on mac itself.
- ethin 2mo agoI would look at osxcross[0] if you haven't looked into it already. It can at least do the "build stuff targeting macos" part (well, relatively speaking). Swift support kinda breaks down, unfortunately, and actually getting it set up is a bit of a hassle. but it does work. [0]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
- account42 2mo agoWould be nice to have a "sanity check the resulting binary" tool though like you can use Wine for Windows builds.
- imoverclocked 2mo agoDo you plan on supporting different target versions and implementing similar restrictions to those targets? eg: older macOS had a writable /usr/ while newer does not without manual effort. Also, do you plan on having similar cli tools available with similar features ported (maybe from the available Darwin sources?) eg: can I run a /bin/bash script that expects a macOS environment? Will it get "Darwin" from "uname -o"
- nullsanity 2mo ago[dead]
- leothetechguy 2mo agothis is something I've been waiting for a long time. I will be watching this with great interest. If this ever gets far enough I would love to see something similar to yabridge implemented on top of this and be able to run AU binaries on linux.
- petesergeant 2mo agoWhat's your use-case? Are you hoping for eventual GUI before it becomes useful, or there's value for you in the CLI?
- leothetechguy 2mo agoI just want to use macOS plugins for music production on asahi linux. A GUI is important but not strictly necessary I guess. So yeah, limited gui support would be great.
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoIt's not on the list of goals yet (so far only CLI and a stable basis), but of course if I went to GUI, it would be nice, since I work in Logic Pro :) By the way, has anyone checked if the utility works on Asahi Linux (or on real non-Mac hardware)?
- Natalia724 2mo ago[dead]
- 13rac1 2mo agoInteresting project! A long term vision for MacOS applications is feasible given the success of WINE/Proton with Windows applications. Are you familiar with the Darling project? https://github.com/darlinghq/darling https://github.com/darlinghq/darling There's an open PR for ARM64 support https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1753 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1753 Could you combine efforts or do your goals differ too much?
- iSnow 2mo agoIn their "License" section on Github, they write "This project is not derived from Darling." - so they clearly are familiar with it.
- ZiiS 2mo agoWine got a lot of support from games, even today productivity apps are often much less supported.
- doctorpangloss 2mo agoYeah.. just give me a thing I double click that starts After Effects and Excel.
- mananaysiempre 2mo agoWhich makes sense, games have a much smaller area of contact with the host platform. This sounds strange given how much modern GPUs can do, but consider that a typical Windows machine ca. 2005 will have Access/JET Red, Active Directory/JET Blue, possibly MSSQL, definitely MSMQ/MTS, ODBC, OLE DB, DAO, ADO, that one SQL interpreter inside Windows Installer, and I’ve only just listed Microsoft’s database-adjacent things. I’m not surprised that press reports about the “MinWin” initiative mentioned as the main difficulty the fact that nobody could figure out if any given component was actually necessary for a Windows install to function, let alone to be compatible with third-party software. (Is anybody other than WordPad using the Word 6.0 parser included among the text converters?..) Now consider that this was, by our standards, a lightweight system on a massively underpowered computer.
- yourewrongsorry 2mo ago[flagged]
- leothetechguy 2mo agorust is a tool like any other, grow up. I personally find it easier to work with than c++ in many cases. EDIT: On second look... you okay dude? That's an awful lot of anger and swearing for an account created 11 minutes ago. Please calm down for your own sake or do something different at least
- meindnoch 2mo agoHow did he predict your comment?
- leothetechguy 2mo agoI didn't, I just went to his profile and checked the comments since I had a feeling he wasn't being rational. And I saw a lot of very angry comments made before this one.
- rvz 2mo agoHow can we tell that this is truly a clean room project and that there is no code from either (Claude or yourself) that is derived from the Darling project? Otherwise great project.
- billyjobob 2mo agoDarling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly. But it is the main (only?) prior art, so it could be argued that everything the LLM knows about how to do this came because it read and understood Darling, i.e. if Darling didn't exist it may still be able to do this but it would have to figure it out from first principles. Not saying it happened here, but it's an interesting thought experiment: what if you order an LLm to achieve the same goal as a popular open source project, using all the lessons learned and pitfalls faced by that project, but not to copy the code. Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage. Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism.
- rvz 2mo ago> Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly. Just because it is written in a different language does not mean that it is a clean room implementation. The logic from Darling might as well have been lifted and then rewritten by a human or an LLM agent. > Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage. Is that why coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex have so many bugs in them? This is entirely dependent on the language chosen with the humans behind the decision to review and accept some of the changes. > Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism. Humans (researchers) also appropriately credit the work that inspires them, especially in experiments and research.
- mathisfun123 2mo agoyou can copyright a specific implementation but that doesn't necessarily grant a patent on the "algorithm". so unless darling is patented then a translation of the "algorithms" in darling is legal. to wit: that's why all the "numerical recipes" books couldn't block implementations in other languages.
- theproblemisyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- leothetechguy 2mo agoI'm not the guy that's banning you. I come here with the expectation that this isn't 4chan and I leave my opinions exactly as they are while still being polite. This isn't inevitable. Else nobody would use this site. You can be upset about many things like AI and people will share that sentiment or not. You can read the Guidelines, it's not hard to see they aren't unreasonable. And it's easy to see if you violate them. Thanks for the Death Threat.
- Arshad-Talpur 2mo agoThis is something i have been looking for long time, however i have gone through repository and docs and the problem is bigger and solution still seems to be early, I am curious how you gonna take further, will be watching it
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoThank you very much!
- theproblemisyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- leothetechguy 2mo agoFine. Wishing I burned in a Fire isn't technically a Death Threat. Congratulations. I have no incentive to be nice either, but I am because I want to. And If you are nice while constructively formulating your anger you don't get banned. easy. sounds like you are just being an asshole because you hate the general consensus on this site, and can't be bothered to be polite in favor of creating new accounts all the time. That makes you the asshole from my perspective. Have a great Day.
- tempaccountabcd 2mo ago[dead]
- youareinsuffera 2mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- zahlman 2mo ago> NEVER ONCE allowed me to post here at all, ever, period. > My first attempt at posting here was in 2021. That account was shadowbanned within hours, for no discernable reason. I was astounded. Have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com to figure out the problem?
- MaxelX 2mo agoQuite the interesting work! Although I don't use macOS binaries, I can see this is promising.
- youareinsuffera 2mo ago[flagged]
- hamza7159 2mo ago[dead]
- derefr 2mo agoIf you didn't care about having a fully-redistributable image, but were okay with doing things more like modern old-console-game decompilation projects do (where compiling the project requires the original game ROM as an input), would a project like this be more trivial? I.e. how hard would it be, comparatively, to design a virtualization framework that doesn't actually ship with any ground-up-rewritten libraries, but instead just expects to execute the binary in question in the context of a full rootfs copied over from a "real" macOS install?
- fl0id 2mo agowith games, afaik that is mostly necessary for assets. For an OS, this would basically like a VM and is slower/more overhead.
- fareesh 2mo agoWould be nice to be able to build iOS apps on Linux ARM runners
- Gabrys1 2mo agoAnd that's the intended goal for the project
- cactusplant7374 2mo agoI'm curious, how many agent hours have you spent on this so far?
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoBased on the commit history, it took about 6 days of active development. As for the AI assistant, I used Grok 4.5 in Build (Medium, no sub-agents, just standard chats and Plan Mode). I can't track the exact hours, but I spent several full days hyper-focused on this. Naturally, I hit the weekly usage limits all the time and had to sit around waiting for the cooldowns (like now :). Thanks for the question!
- claiir 2mo ago[flagged]
- cromka 2mo agoAre there any obvious mistakes? Because the way I see it, AI can and the most models actually do write better READMEs than most people ever cared.
- eddysin 2mo ago[flagged]
- idieifkiwdu 2mo agoReally cool project, but honest question though: why do people tend to name these projects so horribly? I know software engineers aren’t actually known for their creative acuity when it comes to naming, but damn, Kakehashi is just bad.
- misnome 2mo agoDo names have to be English?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoHaha, thanks for the comment! My previous project had a more traditional name: WIE (Wie is Emulator), which was an attempt to run PE64 binaries on macOS via Cranelift JIT. It was an ironic joke nod to WINE (and it still survives in the GitHub organization name). For this one, I wanted something more conceptual. Kakehashi (掛け橋) means "bridge" or "go-between" in Japanese. Plus, I just really liked how it sounds and harmonizes with Asahi Linux.
- account42 2mo agoWIE is also bad because the W in Wine is for Windows. Should have gone with MIE for both the Wine worldplay and weebery (well close enough anyway).
- richard_gg 2mo ago[flagged]
- vancekai 2mo ago[dead]
- kazinator 2mo agoA future optimized release can be code-named Kakeashi. :)
- alexboehm 2mo agoInteresting, I've been building the inverse of this project, to enable running Linux binaries on macOS, as that's not something I've seen in an active project. It works an a very similar way but it's in Zig. I'll post it soon!
- vlad_kalinkin 2mo agoWow! Best of luck with your project. It's truly amazing how our ideas mirrored each other perfectly :)
- rurban 2mo agoI'd really need to marry this with qemu and osxcross, the ability to cross compile from x86_64-linux to darwin. So far I could only test apple compilation, but not runtime yet.