Technology

59742 readers

3927 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

171

Qualcomm will try to have its Apple Silicon moment in PCs with “Snapdragon X” (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it was just an example of a compatibility layer

It's a different problem under the same name. You're comparing apples to oranges by comparing WINE and Rosetta.

WINE (as I understand it) explicitly does its best to maintain the instructions and basically just implements functions that are missing.

Rosetta actually changes out every instruction (and presumably has to do a WINE-like thing as well to handle dynamically linked code, though in theory this is more of a 1-to-1 mapping since you're not swapping OSes).

if there's no viable way to translate those x86 legacy applications over to ARM

For a properly written application that doesn't have a lot of third party binary dependents... This really shouldn't be that big of a job. You just recompile the code on ARM, test, and fix any bugs.

I'd speculate that most of the time this stuff comes up like: "this was written for Windows with some very specific Microsoft libraries/tech in mind and we want to run it on Linux and ARM as cost cutting measures."

Granted, it's not unusual for a large enough code base to contain some code that wasn't written in an architecture neutral way/does some shady stuff.

[–] Defaced 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not comparing Rosetta and proton...I'm just using them as examples of compatibility layers that make their products viable. I frankly don't give a shit about the inner workings of Rosetta or proton, but thanks for clarifying I guess.