Native Windows PE File Loading on OS X?

ozmanjusri writes "Coders working on Wine for Mac have found that the Mac loader has gained its own undocumented ability to load and understand Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. They found PE loading capabilities in Leopard that weren't there in Tiger. Further dissection showed that Apple is masking references to 'Win' and 'PE' in the dll, which means it's not an accidental inclusion. Is Apple planning native PE execution within OS X?"

Hmm...

[FlyByPC]

A recent article was talking about how much less reliable Leopard seems to be than Tiger.

Now we find out that Leopard has some Windows compatibility. Maybe they're just making it bug-for-bug compatible?

How long until we hear Apple take up the "it's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature" line?

Re:Watch out microsoft

[g0at]

Interesting. One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it. If OSX were able to run windows executables natively (think Microsoft Office and games) that would be a major coup for Apple. Plus you wouldn't need to sit around hoping that WINE decides to support that application.

Eh? Did you copy/paste this from a discussion five years ago?

-b

Re:On what fantasy planet do you live on?

[colourmyeyes]

Try not to say the same thing twice in your subject, because that's redundant, which means you're saying the same thing twice and being redundant.

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[Marcos Eliziario]

"As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as good as the real thing."

Yeah, most of my pet spywares fail to run correctly under wine.

isn't as much software available?

[JonTurner]

One of the major downsides to using OSX is that there isn't as much software available for it.

Quite true. I've not seen an OSX virus, trojan or spyware in years.

Re:Most likely there for EFI

[Anonymous Coward]

Just take a look at /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi -- it has the same "This program cannot be run in DOS mode." at the beginning of the executable

I feel dirty.

Re:noooo FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy! I can see it now:

Mac OSX 10.8 British Longhair

Now with Windows 1.0 executable loading support! Finally, you can run reversi natively on Mac OSX! That's right, REVERSI!

Re:Not for Win32 compatibility

[denmarkw00t]

"As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as good as the real thing."

Let's see, in Wine I have trouble with performance, compatibility and software just working the way its supposed to - sounds like it works a little better than Windows.