Wine (software)
 |
|
|
|
| Original author(s) | Alexandre Julliard |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) |
Wine authors (1,534) |
| Initial release | 4 July 1993 |
| Stable release |
2.0 / January 24, 2017
|
| Preview release |
2.1 / February 3, 2017
|
| Repository | source |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C,Yacc,JavaScript,Objective-C |
| Operating system |
Linux FreeBSD macOS (development) |
| Platform | IA-32, x86-64 |
| Size | 21.7 MB (compressed) |
| Type | Compatibility layer |
| License | GNU LGPL v2.1+ |
| Website | www |
Wine (recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a free and open source compatibility layer software application that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.
It duplicates functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. This method of duplication differs from other methods that might also be considered emulation, where Windows programs run in a virtual machine. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues.
The name Wine initially was an abbreviation for Windows emulator. Its meaning later shifted to the recursive acronym, Wine is not an emulator in order to differentiate the software from CPU emulators. While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine.
The phrase "wine is not an emulator" is a reference to the fact that no processor code execution emulation occurs when running a Windows application under Wine. "Emulation" usually refers to the execution of compiled code intended for one processor (such as x86) by interpreting/recompiling software running on a different processor (such as PowerPC). Such emulation is almost always much slower than execution of the same code by the processor for which the code was compiled. In Wine, the Windows application's compiled x86 code runs at near native speed on the computer's x86 processor, just as it does when running under Windows. Windows system services are also supplied by Wine, in the form of wineserver.
...
Wikipedia