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- A future optimized release can be code-named Kakeashi. :)by kazinator
- I'm curious, how many agent hours have you spent on this so far?
- Based on the commit history, it took about 6 days of active development.
As for the AI assistant, I used Grok 4.5 in Build (Medium, no sub-agents, just standard chats and Plan Mode). I can't track the exact hours, but I spent several full days hyper-focused on this. Naturally, I hit the weekly usage limits all the time and had to sit around waiting for the cooldowns (like now :).
Thanks for the question!
- Quite the interesting work! Although I don't use macOS binaries, I can see this is promising.by MaxelX
- I'd really need to marry this with qemu and osxcross, the ability to cross compile from x86_64-linux to darwin. So far I could only test apple compilation, but not runtime yet.by rurban
- 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?
by derefr - with games, afaik that is mostly necessary for assets. For an OS, this would basically like a VM and is slower/more overhead.by fl0id
- this is something I've been waiting for a long time. I will be watching this with great interest.
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.
- What's your use-case? Are you hoping for eventual GUI before it becomes useful, or there's value for you in the CLI?by petesergeant
- 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
- Thank you very much!
- Really cool project, but honest question though: why do people tend to name these projects so horribly? I know software engineers aren’t actually known for their creative acuity when it comes to naming, but damn, Kakehashi is just bad.by idieifkiwdu
- Kakehashi is perfectly fine for the 2/3 of humanity that live in Asia.
Open up your mind and learn other cultures.
by harrouet - Do names have to be English?by misnome
- Haha, thanks for the comment!
My previous project had a more traditional name: WIE (Wie is Emulator), which was an attempt to run PE64 binaries on macOS via Cranelift JIT. It was an ironic joke nod to WINE (and it still survives in the GitHub organization name).
For this one, I wanted something more conceptual. Kakehashi (掛け橋) means "bridge" or "go-between" in Japanese. Plus, I just really liked how it sounds and harmonizes with Asahi Linux.
- 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?
Otherwise great project.
by rvz - 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.
by billyjobob - 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!
- Interesting, I've been building the inverse of this project, to enable running Linux binaries on macOS, as that's not something I've seen in an active project. It works an a very similar way but it's in Zig.
I'll post it soon!
by alexboehm - Wow! Best of luck with your project. It's truly amazing how our ideas mirrored each other perfectly :)
- 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!
- Do you plan on supporting different target versions and implementing similar restrictions to those targets?
eg: older macOS had a writable /usr/ while newer does not without manual effort.
Also, do you plan on having similar cli tools available with similar features ported (maybe from the available Darwin sources?)
eg: can I run a /bin/bash script that expects a macOS environment? Will it get "Darwin" from "uname -o"
- I assume you eventually plan to target binaries that don't already exist on Linux? Where do you think you'll start?by StilesCrisis
- Interesting project! A long term vision for MacOS applications is feasible given the success of WINE/Proton with Windows applications.
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?
by 13rac1 - I wonder if this project will have any more momentum than Darling or if the set mac=only programs that people want to run on Linux is just too small.by account42
- Wine got a lot of support from games, even today productivity apps are often much less supported.by ZiiS
- In their "License" section on Github, they write "This project is not derived from Darling." - so they clearly are familiar with it.by iSnow