Question: Will there ever be a native OS X version?
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: quahoac.6803
WINE provides a “rough” ABI emulation through what amounts to a very large library interposing system. It is a fairly old technique that has been used in many different operating systems over the years to do all sorts of interesting things. (See FreeBSD as a great example). It is not a virtual machine in the classic sense as there is only one kernel actually running.
From a performance perspective, in general, anything going through an interposer is going to be slower since there are some clock cycles that must be dedicated to doing the actual translation. The question comes down to how efficient the translation is vs directly calling the normal ABI. In some extreme/perf sensitive areas, it isn’t unusual to see interposers bypass the user layer and work directly with kernel space. I don’t think Cider does this, but it is a possibility.
In any case, I’m looking forward to trying the beta out tomorrow at work!