Interesting project! A long term vision for MacOS applications is feasible given the success of WINE/Proton with Windows applications.<p>Are you familiar with the Darling project? <a href="https://github.com/darlinghq/darling" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/darlinghq/darling</a> There's an open PR for ARM64 support <a href="https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1753" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1753</a> Could you combine efforts or do your goals differ too much?
In their "License" section on Github, they write "This project is not derived from Darling." - so they clearly are familiar with it.
I wonder if this project will have any more momentum than Darling or if the set mac=only programs that people want to run on Linux is just too small.
Wine got a lot of support from games, even today productivity apps are often much less supported.
Which makes sense, games have a much smaller area of contact with the host platform.<p>This sounds strange given how much modern GPUs can do, but consider that a typical Windows machine ca. 2005 will have Access/JET Red, Active Directory/JET Blue, possibly MSSQL, definitely MSMQ/MTS, ODBC, OLE DB, DAO, ADO, that one SQL interpreter inside Windows Installer, and I’ve only just listed Microsoft’s database-adjacent things. I’m not surprised that press reports about the “MinWin” initiative mentioned as the main difficulty the fact that nobody could figure out if any given component was actually necessary for a Windows install to function, let alone to be compatible with third-party software. (Is anybody other than WordPad using the Word 6.0 parser included among the text converters?..) Now consider that this was, by our standards, a lightweight system on a massively underpowered computer.
Yeah.. just give me a thing I double click that starts After Effects and Excel.
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!
I assume you eventually plan to target binaries that don't already exist on Linux? Where do you think you'll start?
Well, of course, most of all I would like to achieve full-fledged support for Xcode Tools (including building iOS applications) and the macOS version of Homebrew. But, of course, there is still a lot of work ahead to get to this point. Thank you!
I would look at osxcross[0] if you haven't looked into it already. It can at least do the "build stuff targeting macos" part (well, relatively speaking). Swift support kinda breaks down, unfortunately, and actually getting it set up is a bit of a hassle. but it does work.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross</a>
And it’s an endlessly moving target, look at how many apps break every major release (and use it to justify regular, expensive paid upgrades)
Do you plan on supporting different target versions and implementing similar restrictions to those targets?<p>eg: older macOS had a writable /usr/ while newer does not without manual effort.<p>Also, do you plan on having similar cli tools available with similar features ported (maybe from the available Darwin sources?)<p>eg: can I run a /bin/bash script that expects a macOS environment? Will it get "Darwin" from "uname -o"
Interesting, I've been building the inverse of this project, to enable running Linux binaries on macOS, as that's not something I've seen in an active project. It works an a very similar way but it's in Zig.<p>I'll post it soon!
Really cool project, but honest question though: why do people tend to name these projects so horribly? I know software engineers aren’t actually known for their creative acuity when it comes to naming, but damn, Kakehashi is just bad.
Haha, thanks for the comment!<p>My previous project had a more traditional name: WIE (Wie is Emulator), which was an attempt to run PE64 binaries on macOS via Cranelift JIT. It was an ironic joke nod to WINE (and it still survives in the GitHub organization name).<p>For this one, I wanted something more conceptual. Kakehashi (掛け橋) means "bridge" or "go-between" in Japanese. Plus, I just really liked how it sounds and harmonizes with Asahi Linux.
Kakehashi is perfectly fine for the 2/3 of humanity that live in Asia.<p>Open up your mind and learn other cultures.
Do names have to be English?
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
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?<p>I.e. how hard would it be, comparatively, to design a virtualization <i>framework</i> that doesn't actually ship with any ground-up-rewritten <i>libraries</i>, but instead just expects to execute the binary in question in the context of a full rootfs copied over from a "real" macOS install?
A future optimized release can be code-named Kakeashi. :)
this is something I've been waiting for a long time. I will be watching this with great interest.<p>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.
Would be nice to be able to build iOS apps on Linux ARM runners
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?<p>Otherwise great project.
Thanks for the comment! You guessed it, I did use LLMs during development. While the strict definition of a "clean room" design can be debatable when AI is involved, I'd consider this a "light-gray room" approach. There is no direct code plagiarism here: Kakehashi is written from scratch in Rust, whereas Darling is built on C/objc. Furthermore, the architecture is fundamentally different—Darling relies on kernel-level emulation, while Kakehashi is purely focused on a lightweight userspace approach for Linux ARM. In my prompts, I explicitly restricted the use of proprietary components. Ultimately, the codebase speaks for itself, and I welcome everyone to audit the repository! Thanks again!
Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly. But it is the main (only?) prior art, so it could be argued that everything the LLM knows about how to do this came because it read and understood Darling, i.e. if Darling didn't exist it may still be able to do this but it would have to figure it out from first principles.<p>Not saying it happened here, but it's an interesting thought experiment: what if you order an LLm to achieve the same goal as a popular open source project, using all the lessons learned and pitfalls faced by that project, but not to copy the code. Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage. Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism.
> Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly.<p>Just because it is written in a different language does not mean that it is a clean room implementation. The logic from Darling might as well have been lifted and then rewritten by a human or an LLM agent.<p>> Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage.<p>Is that why coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex have so many bugs in them? This is entirely dependent on the language chosen with the humans behind the decision to review and accept some of the changes.<p>> Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism.<p>Humans (researchers) also <i>appropriately</i> credit the work that inspires them, especially in experiments and research.
> Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code<p>lol. Find better humans.
Quite the interesting work! Although I don't use macOS binaries, I can see this is promising.
I'm curious, how many agent hours have you spent on this so far?
Based on the commit history, it took about 6 days of active development.<p>As for the AI assistant, I used Grok 4.5 in Build (Medium, no sub-agents, just standard chats and Plan Mode). I can't track the exact hours, but I spent several full days hyper-focused on this. Naturally, I hit the weekly usage limits all the time and had to sit around waiting for the cooldowns (like now :).<p>Thanks for the question!
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> NEVER ONCE allowed me to post here at all, ever, period.<p>> My first attempt at posting here was in 2021. That account was shadowbanned within hours, for no discernable reason. I was astounded.<p>Have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com to figure out the problem?
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I'm not the guy that's banning you.<p>I come here with the expectation that this isn't 4chan and I leave my opinions exactly as they are while still being polite. This isn't inevitable. Else nobody would use this site. You can be upset about many things like AI and people will share that sentiment or not. You can read the Guidelines, it's not hard to see they aren't unreasonable. And it's easy to see if you violate them.<p>Thanks for the Death Threat.
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Fine. Wishing I burned in a Fire isn't technically a Death Threat. Congratulations.<p>I have no incentive to be nice either, but I am because I want to. And If you are nice while constructively formulating your anger you don't get banned. easy.<p>sounds like you are just being an asshole because you hate the general consensus on this site, and can't be bothered to be polite in favor of creating new accounts all the time. That makes you the asshole from my perspective.<p>Have a great Day.
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rust is a tool like any other, grow up.<p>I personally find it easier to work with than c++ in many cases.<p>EDIT: On second look... you okay dude? That's an awful lot of anger and swearing for an account created 11 minutes ago. Please calm down for your own sake or do something different at least
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