Comment by msclrhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msclrhd | Hacker News Reader

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Emulation is typically reserved for processor emulation. A NES emulator works by simulating the CPU, PPU (GPU), bus and other parts of the NES system on the computer running the emulator. DOSEmu, QEmu, and Amiga Forever work in similar ways.

When Wine runs an application or game, that program is executing directly on the computer's CPU, so it is not an emulator.

Think of it like when you have a Qt/KDE or Gtk/Gnome application and run that on the other platform, or on Windows or Mac. You have the APIs the application is calling (Qt or Gtk) which are the same regardless of the platform they are running on; for Wine these are the Windows APIs. The libraries then map the library APIs to the platform APIs, like how Wine is mapping the Windows APIs to Linux/Mac/etc.

Word emulation means to pretend something else, just because most of the time emulating hardware is required doesn't mean that the meaning of the word change.

Since you mentioned Amiga, there was an MacOS emulator called ShapeShifter[1], it didn't emulate CPU since at the time MacOS used the same CPU as Amiga, but it still referred itself as an emulator. Actually I remember that MacOS run even faster on Amiga + ShapeShifter than original Mac with similar hardware.

If you are not convinced, what about FreeBSD capability to emulate Linux[2] ABI allowing to run linux binaries as if they were native. This also doesn't emulate the CPU and other hardware. And I suppose it is even closer to what WINE does.

[1] https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/

[2] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-emulation/free...

That's a lost etymological battle, just like we can forever repeat that "hacker" does not equal "cybercriminal": even though the thesaurus says otherwise, one narrower definition of the word has taken over.

I don't think this is comparable. World emulation exists outside of technology, and has specific meaning (pretending to be something else).

Also in this case (unlike word "hacker") the word isn't used incorrectly. It's just more broad than most people think. It's only WINE that claims itself to not be emulator, despite in early FAQ calling itself Windows Emulator.

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