Jeremy White
My family likes to make fun of me because I enjoy hard problems. One of my favorite games of all time is Don't Starve. The way I played it - with no googling allowed - meant that I died all the time. While each death would make me pull out more and more of my hair, when I was finally able to master winter and find the portal, I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment.
That's true for CodeWeavers, as well. My first guiding principle is that I want to do challenging and meaningful work.
And, it turns out, working on Wine is the most challenging thing I've ever been part of. We are re-implementing the Windows operating system; our 43 employees work every day to keep up with the work of the 144,000 people at Microsoft.
Of course, then it was Apple that threw us the nasty curve ball. You see, we don't do all this work ourselves - we rely on the underlying operating system. We don't draw windows on the screen - we use the operating system libraries to perform the actual drawing. And a fundamental truth of Windows software is that pretty much all Windows programs are 32 bit programs. Even 64 bit programs will use a 32 bit installer, so you have to have 32 bit support in order to run them. So in order to run 32 bit Windows programs, we need to call a lot of 32 bit libraries.
So when Apple announced that they were removing all 32 bit support from macOS, I knew we had been presented with our most difficult challenge to date.
Fortunately, our Mac development expert Ken Thomases and our team here were up to the challenge. After some false starts and a lot of difficult technical discussions, and then with some help from Apple, we settled on a design strategy that allows us to run 32 bit code within a 64 bit process so we can make calls to the 64 bit system libraries. As you can imagine, there were a lot of details to get right; we had to not only modify Wine, but we had to invent a compiler feature set to support this new mode. However, we feel that it has come out well. Further, one of our fears - that performance would be terrible - has not come to pass. We think the performance is quite nice, all things considered.
I am excited that we have released CrossOver 19 and we are providing support for 32 bit Windows applications on an operating system with no 32 bit libraries - our own Christmas Miracle.
In the New Year, we are looking forward to Wine 5.0 and building new a version of CrossOver that leverages the incredible range of work that is going into Wine 5.0 as we speak.
I remain grateful to the many members of our community, from developers, to beta testers, to customers, that continue to support us in our work. I like to imagine that there are about 143,957 of you.
Join us in celebration by taking 40% off CrossOver with dealcode MIRACLE!*
*Offer not valid on LifeTime License. Offer expires on December 17, 2019 at 11:59 PM.
Cheers,
Jeremy
>>> Announcing a First Alpha Build for CrossOver 19 for macOS Catalina
>>> Quick Catalina Update — October 25, 2019
