> In case you weren't aware Wine is not an emulator, it is a compatibility layer.
Ehhh. I know it’s in the name, but I feel like the significance is debatable. It’s not a CPU emulator, true. It is emulating calls, which is emulation of a sort.
Ehhh. I know it’s in the name, but I feel like the significance is debatable. It’s not a CPU emulator, true. It is emulating calls, which is emulation of a sort.
Related note: if WINE is an emulator why isn't Linux or GNU? They both reimplement parts of UNIX, which was even more proprietary than Windows is today.
I mean, it depends on the context. I don't think it would be wrong to say that Linux "emulates a UNIX environment" or some such, which is closer to what OP actually wrote about Wine.
You've probably used a "terminal emulator" at some point today. ;)
On most of these architectures the software eventually executes as x86 machine code, and the distance between x86 machine code and the actual processes inside a modern CPU implementing the x86 code set is so vast you can call a modern CPU an "x86 emulator built in hardware."
They... are? I mean for that matter Intel/AMD instruction sets are CISC emulators on top of RISC silicon.
People who came into using the term earlier tend to think of it more narrowly, but colloquial use of the term has drifted to mean something more generic, e.g. "emulation" used to mean "making one piece of hardware pretend to be another", but now can sometimes just mean, "when one thing acts like another at all".
"Emulator" might be a more recent term—it would be interesting to see the etymology, actually—but it's reasonable to conclude that anything which "emulates" must be an "emulator". (Also, OP didn't actually use the word "emulator".)
Edit: Nope, the word "emulator" dates back to at least the 1800s (although it has certainly grown in usage more recently): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=emulator&year_...
Aha! It was Apple's Macintosh release, which included an Apple II emulator built-in: https://books.google.com/books?id=Ti8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=P...
I do assume most of the increase in usage was related to computers/software, however. The timing is right.
Exactly the same way as wine. Wine does not translate the calls, it for most part actually implements the underlying logic.
Win32 is just a bunch of shared libraries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_library_file...
> That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.
> [...]
> "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.
> emulate (transitive verb)
> To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.
It's the exact same way its used by FreeBSD for its linux compatibility layer. It's the same way that Wine even uses in their FAQ.
> That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.
> [...]
> "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.
Even your own quote reveals the issue:
> > That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator
Yet nobody talks about the latest Windows as being an emulator for older windows …
In short, this definition is akin to defining humans as “bipeds without feather”, we definitely fit this definition but it's way too broad to be useful.