This is a semantics debate, but it kind of is an emulator. Instead of emulating a CPU, it emulates the Windows API. That's obviously a major difference: One is inherently slower, while the other is inherently more complicated.

WINE originally stood for "Windows Emulator", but for trademark reasons it was changed to "Wine Is Not An Emulator". That's giving you some mixed messages now, isn't it? [edit] I just checked Wikipedia, and that's not true -- the name wasn't changed due to a trademark problem, it was changed due to a genuine confusion about what the term "emulator" meant.

It implements the Windows API.

And the Windows API is defined as "whatever Windows does", which Wine emulates.

> - The new Apple Silicon Macs are supported, including running x86-64 binaries under Rosetta 2.

Depends which ARM :)

Apple Silicon has special support for running ARM code with the "Total Store Order" memory model of x86.

JIT-compiling emulators for other ARM processors otherwise need to be stuff the code full of memory fence instructions to be able to utilise multiple cores properly. Optimising those away can be hard.

Not really though, it's just another layer which isn't wine. They might put effort in to help Rosetta translate, but wine is not an emulator.

I think some bits got added from the point where they got Wine working on OSX PPC back in the day.

I'm aware of what the acronym originally meant, but this was listed as working in the 6.x series for 64-bit x86 apps.

You can setup binfmt_misc to run x86 Windows binaries with Wine and Qemu on other architectures like ARM.