When will Wine integrate an x86 CPU emulator so we can run Windows applications on non-x86 machines?
The short answer is ‘probably never’. Remember, Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator. The long answer is that we probably don’t want or need to integrate one in the traditional sense. Integrating a CPU emulator in Wine would be extremely hard, due to the large number of Windows APIs and the complex data types they exchange. It is not uncommon for a Windows API to take three or more pointers to structures composed of many fields, including pointers to other complex structures. For each of these we would need a conversion routine to deal with the byte order and alignment issues. Furthermore, Windows also contains many callback mechanisms that constitute as many extra places where we would have to handle these conversion issues. Wine already has to deal with 16 vs. 32 bit APIs and Ansi vs. Unicode APIs which both introduce significant complexity. Adding support for a CPU emulator inside Wine would introduce at least double that complexity and only serve to slow down the development of Wine. Fortu
