Robert X. Cringely has recently weighed in on his belief that Apple will provide a full windows api for virtualisation of windows xp, on a mac.
native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all.
This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather
by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5.
Ok, that’s fine - but is Mr Cringely away of how long it has taken the Wine project to build a functional Windows API? The wine project kicked off in 1998 - some eight years ago. The reality is an API isn’t going to be a long term win for Apple, why?
Microsoft has a history of breaking and changing it’s own operating system API - being closed source Microsoft is quite within their rights to change it as often as they wish, thus an API genuinely isn’t the answer and unfortunately has never been.
While Microsoft have undoubtedly got code for NT and perhaps Windows 2000, as mentioned in the above article - bootcamp is an example of where that code might be useful. Steve Jobs is an OS X man - allowing users to running windows is a smart marketing move only, if for no other reason than it reduces the support headaches due to folks attempting a community driven install that may break without warning. OS X is Job’s baby and he isn’t going to race to support Windows applications at the risk of reducing OS X performance or stability.
Virtualisation, is the answer Mr Cringely, not trying to keep code running for a constantly moving target. Intel has recently pushed the concepts of virtualisation technology, they want to do that on the die itself - effectively allowing two (or more) different Operating Systems to run simultaneously as though each had it’s own dedicated server. That would allow core duo systems to run a virtual copy of Windows XP or Vista at an almost real-world speed. It’s a “jailed” environment and keeps Windows code out of OS X. Apple has the advantage of being able to leverage Intel based virtual technology, which would cut down the amount of virtualisation software needed by a massive degree.
Virtualisation is the future of computing - it’s an unlikely situation to expect Apple to look backwards to an ever-changing API support than than forwards to virtual technology..
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of apple, technology, virtualisation.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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