Article is a bit short on "the basics" - I assumed they used some kind of wine port to run it. But it seems they implemented the x86_64 ISA on a RISC-V chip in some way - anyone can shed more light on that part how that is done?
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> Because box86 uses the native versions of some “system” libraries, like libc, libm, SDL, and OpenGL, it’s easy to integrate and use with most applications, and performance can be surprisingly high in some cases.
Wine can also be compiled/run as native.
I'm not sure you can run Wine natively to run x86 Windows programs on RISC-V because Wine is not an emulator. There is an ARM port of Wine, but that can only run Windows ARM programs, not x86.
Instead box64 is running the x86_64 Wine https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/blob/main/docs/X64WINE.md
(Although I suspect providing the API of one architecture while building for another is far easier said than done. Toolchains tend to be uncooperative about such shenanigans, for starters.)
Wine's own documentation says it requires an emulator: https://wiki.winehq.org/Emulation
> As Wine Is Not an Emulator, all those applications can't run on other architectures with Wine alone.
Or do you mean provide the x86_64 Windows API as a native RISC-V/ARM to the emulator layer? That would require some deeper integration for the emulator, but that's what Box64/box86 already does with some Linux libraries: intercept the api calls and replace them with native libraries. Not sure if it does it for wine
Yeah, that's what I meant. It's simple in principle, after all: turn an AMD64 call into an ARM/RISCV call and pass it to native code.
Doing that for Wine would be pretty tricky (way more surface area to cover, possible differences between certain Win32 arch-specific structs and so forth) so I bet that's not how it works out of the box, but I couldn't tell for sure by skimming through the box64 repo.