Darling: Run macOS Software Directly on Linux
Run macOS Software on Linux
Darling is a free, open-source translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux without hardware emulation. It implements a complete Darwin environment, including Mach, dyld, and launchd, and aims to integrate apps seamlessly into the Linux desktop. While GUI support is still experimental, Darling already runs many command-line tools and can even work on Windows via WSL 2. It's built on Apple's open-source Darwin code and uses The Cocotron for its Cocoa implementation.
We aim to fully integrate apps running under Darling into the Linux desktop experience by making them look, feel and behave just like native Linux apps.
- ay
I went down a deep but entertaining rabbit hole in the other direction for fun: https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/fakelinux - initially with the idea “just replace the syscalls in the executable with some sort of a trap and handle that”.
It almost worked, unfortunately MacOS reserves x18 for platform purposes and Linux doesn’t.
The result is some sort of pretty mad contraption which works sufficiently often to compile aarch64 Linux VPP and its dependencies on the Mac using Linux gcc :)
I suppose with some polish it might be useful for something..
- porphyra
In theory, running Apple Silicon apps on ARM64 linux machines would be really nice. But we are still far from having a performant and feature-complete implementation of doing so.
Darling only targets x86_64 stuff. Still, it's a cool project.
Kinda sad that there are very few updates though [1]
- ncr100
> Do you know about opensource.apple.com, GNUstep, The Cocotron and other projects?
> We do, and in fact, Darling is largely based on the original Darwin source code published by Apple. We use The Cocotron as a basis for our Cocoa implementation, along with the Apportable Foundation and various bits of GNUstep.
Apportable (<3) was a YC startup https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable from 2011 - the Foundation repo last update was Dec 2014.
- nonestdeus
Cool that it exists, but I honestly don't even know which mac exclusive program I would want to install.
- jagged-chisel
Quibble: it'll run anything that runs on open source Darwin. You won't be running anything needing macOS frameworks.