i'm intrigued by this project. input a windows game, output a macosx executable. i have to admit that i'd love to have such a thing.

but i'm skeptical. what's to keep this from turning into a huge ungainly decades-long slog? given the history of the WINE project, that's what i'd assume is looming on the horizon.

There's really little to keep it from turning into that. In fact, I don't see any way it couldn't be decades long, if the plan is real windows compatibility. However, I think that the points I detailed under the potential new Alky design would keep things considerably simpler (though I think it's unlikely anyone would pick up the design).

As I said, I think the absolute key is a focus on maintainability. Everything comes from there.

>what's to keep this from turning into a huge ungainly decades-long slog?

Aggressive willingness to rebuild based on new knowledge.

I don't really think it's going to be practical to try to make Alky encompass compatibility with all windows applications.

I don't think it's practical to even attempt 80% of the apps out there. Wine already works for most of the basic windows applications.

The issue is various, in particular performance sensitive, software (games, CAD) that are windows-only and a pain to get working in Wine (let alone performant).

The wine approach is fine if you're satisfied with neglecting niche software + games, but a lot of what's holding people back is the fact that their computer is an entertainment box and cannot migrate said entertainment to OS X / Linux.

That's the essential problem I want to solve. How much surface area, compatibility-wise, that'll force us to cover is at present unknown to me. I'll just have to see what happens.

I'm really glad you put that up. Not only does it make it easier for people to access it (as you saw, it's difficult to get it from me personally), but it's been interesting to walk over it myself. It's been some years since I've so much as looked at it, so it's been interesting to look over things like NuContext, the COM class infrastructure, etc. I've forgotten most of the deep details of the codebase, so it's been like reading it for the first time. Really very cool.

I'm going to try and grab the Philosopher (compiler infrastructure used for the shader hacking) source off my backup drive in a few days and throw it up on Github.

Yeah I'd love to see the shader hacking stuff you've got.

I'm mulling over the Mono vs. blah question, let alone how to take the design from here. I'm going to be mulling over it until at least New Year's.