Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM
https://github.com/wie-project/kakehashiAre 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?
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.
Perhaps LLMs change that calculation. I really couldn’t say.
eg: older macOS had a writable /usr/ while newer does not without manual effort.
Also, do you plan on having similar cli tools available with similar features ported (maybe from the available Darwin sources?)
eg: can I run a /bin/bash script that expects a macOS environment? Will it get "Darwin" from "uname -o"
I'll post it soon!
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.
By the way, has anyone checked if the utility works on Asahi Linux (or on real non-Mac hardware)?
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).
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.
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?
Otherwise great project.
What do you mean by "proprietary components"?
By "proprietary components," I meant that in my prompts, I explicitly forbade the copying or direct implementation of private Apple code. Of course, since LLMs are a bit of a black box, it's hard to be 100% certain about everything it synthesized under the hood, but the clear intent was to stick to public ABI definitions and standard open specs.
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.
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.
> Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage.
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.
> Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism.
Humans (researchers) also appropriately credit the work that inspires them, especially in experiments and research.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Souther....
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 :).
Thanks for the question!
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.
Thanks for the Death Threat.
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.
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.
Have a great Day.
I personally find it easier to work with than c++ in many cases.
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