Also the WSL team is forbidden from looking at the source.
So both your points are as irrelevant as they are snarky.
To the original developers of the Windows application, perhaps. Not to the rest of the world. Not unless that Windows application is open source.
Windows has years upon years, multiple layers, and multiple versions of APIs, with quite some buggy behaviour preserved for the sake of "backwards compatibility". Linux (the kernel) has a much smaller userspace API.
Wine has to reverse-engineer not only the Windows kernel, but also all the editions and versions and layers of the Windows userspace. WSL has to implement just the Linux userspace API.
> Also the WSL team is forbidden from looking at the source.
Are they also forbidden from reading the excellent man pages (of say, glibc) or the kernel documentation? That is as direct a source of information as they can get without having to parse source code. And the other BSD-licensed implementations of the Linux userland APIs are available in source code form. Quite different from reverse-engineering dlls and runtime behaviour.
> ... as they are snarky.
Personal attacks are not welcome on HN.
In all my years of computers, few projects have impressed me as much as Wine. It still feels like it shouldn't be possible, and yet, it works wonderfully.