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Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM

114 pointsby vlad_kalinkintoday at 4:26 PM29 commentsview on HN

Comments

13rac1today at 5:06 PM

Interesting project! A long term vision for MacOS applications is feasible given the success of WINE/Proton with Windows applications.

Are you familiar with the Darling project? https://github.com/darlinghq/darling There's an open PR for ARM64 support https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1753 Could you combine efforts or do your goals differ too much?

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vlad_kalinkintoday at 4:26 PM

Hi HN, I started developing an experimental project with the goal of running macOS CLI binaries natively on Linux ARM machines. As of now, we have working prototypes for: - 7-Zip: Passes multi-threaded compression tests on an 8k-file tree. Currently ~5.2x slower than native Linux execution, but I already mapped out a clear optimization plan to cut this gap down. - curl: Over 200 commands and options successfully pass our automated Docker test script. - Xcode Tools Git: Basic version control commands (init, add, commit) are up and running, though 100% stability is not yet guaranteed. I would be highly grateful for your constructive criticism, architectural ideas, and feedback! Thank you!

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Arshad-Talpurtoday at 5:33 PM

This is something i have been looking for long time, however i have gone through repository and docs and the problem is bigger and solution still seems to be early, I am curious how you gonna take further, will be watching it

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derefrtoday at 7:09 PM

If you didn't care about having a fully-redistributable image, but were okay with doing things more like modern old-console-game decompilation projects do (where compiling the project requires the original game ROM as an input), would a project like this be more trivial?

I.e. how hard would it be, comparatively, to design a virtualization framework that doesn't actually ship with any ground-up-rewritten libraries, but instead just expects to execute the binary in question in the context of a full rootfs copied over from a "real" macOS install?

leothetechguytoday at 5:09 PM

this is something I've been waiting for a long time. I will be watching this with great interest.

If this ever gets far enough I would love to see something similar to yabridge implemented on top of this and be able to run AU binaries on linux.

fareeshtoday at 7:18 PM

Would be nice to be able to build iOS apps on Linux ARM runners

cactusplant7374today at 8:34 PM

I'm curious, how many agent hours have you spent on this so far?

MaxelXtoday at 6:06 PM

Quite the interesting work! Although I don't use macOS binaries, I can see this is promising.

rvztoday at 5:12 PM

How can we tell that this is truly a clean room project and that there is no code from either (Claude or yourself) that is derived from the Darling project?

Otherwise great project.

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hamza7159today at 6:57 PM

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Natalia724today at 5:02 PM

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tempaccountabcdtoday at 5:57 PM

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theproblemisyoutoday at 5:25 PM

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