Hi HN,
I started developing an experimental project with the goal of running macOS CLI binaries natively on Linux ARM machines.
As of now, we have working prototypes for:
- 7-Zip: Passes multi-threaded compression tests on an 8k-file tree. Currently ~5.2x slower than native Linux execution, but I already mapped out a clear optimization plan to cut this gap down.
- curl: Over 200 commands and options successfully pass our automated Docker test script.
- Xcode Tools Git: Basic version control commands (init, add, commit) are up and running, though 100% stability is not yet guaranteed.
I would be highly grateful for your constructive criticism, architectural ideas, and feedback!
Thank you!
Well, of course, most of all I would like to achieve full-fledged support for Xcode Tools (including building iOS applications) and the macOS version of Homebrew. But, of course, there is still a lot of work ahead to get to this point. Thank you!
That's true. But if we can achieve support for the current stable version, it will be much easier to add new features later or rework the ones that were replaced (unless Apple changes everything on purpose :)
This is something i have been looking for long time, however i have gone through repository and docs and the problem is bigger and solution still seems to be early, I am curious how you gonna take further, will be watching it
If you didn't care about having a fully-redistributable image, but were okay with doing things more like modern old-console-game decompilation projects do (where compiling the project requires the original game ROM as an input), would a project like this be more trivial?
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?
How can we tell that this is truly a clean room project and that there is no code from either (Claude or yourself) that is derived from the Darling project?
Thanks for the comment! You guessed it, I did use LLMs during development. While the strict definition of a "clean room" design can be debatable when AI is involved, I'd consider this a "light-gray room" approach. There is no direct code plagiarism here: Kakehashi is written from scratch in Rust, whereas Darling is built on C/objc. Furthermore, the architecture is fundamentally different—Darling relies on kernel-level emulation, while Kakehashi is purely focused on a lightweight userspace approach for Linux ARM. In my prompts, I explicitly restricted the use of proprietary components. Ultimately, the codebase speaks for itself, and I welcome everyone to audit the repository! Thanks again!
Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly. But it is the main (only?) prior art, so it could be argued that everything the LLM knows about how to do this came because it read and understood Darling, i.e. if Darling didn't exist it may still be able to do this but it would have to figure it out from first principles.
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.
> Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly.
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.
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.
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
I didn't, I just went to his profile and checked the comments since I had a feeling he wasn't being rational. And I saw a lot of very angry comments made before this one.
Fine. Wishing I burned in a Fire isn't technically a Death Threat. Congratulations.
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.
Are 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?
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?
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.
Otherwise great project.
What do you mean by "proprietary components"?
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.
lol. Find better humans.
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 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
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.
> My first attempt at posting here was in 2021. That account was shadowbanned within hours, for no discernable reason. I was astounded.
Have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com to figure out the problem?