Will Mac OS X one day run Windows apps without the need for dual booting or virtual machines? That's the question/rumor currently making the rounds after Wine developer Steven Edwards discovered Leopard contains an undocumented loader for Portable Executables, a filetype used in Windows applications.
When Apple made the switch to Intel, it opened up a realm of possible Windows compatibility previously unavailable on the Mac platform. As the success of Boot Camp, Parallels, VMWare Fusion and Wine demonstrate, users would clearly love to have Windows and Mac apps running of the same machine.
And what's better than virtualization and dual booting? Native support.
Further digging has revealed Leopard actually looks for Windows DLL files when trying to open a Windows binary.
It's possible this code is just some remnant of a failed or abandoned project, but it's also possible this is the first whiff of something much bigger - Apple's attempt to run Windows apps alongside Mac OS X apps, no emulation needed.
I've argued in the past that Boot Camp is not an end but a means to an end for Apple and, while my prediction that Apple would acquire Parallels proved untrue, I still think Boot Camp isn't a real Apple solution. Even in its final Leopard form, Boot Camp is far too technical compared to rest of Apple's software offerings. Apple may have removed the beta label, but it still feels like a beta.
Then of course there's the fact that Apple released it as a beta in the first place, which is something the company almost never does. Clearly someone at Apple thinks Windows and OS X together on the same machine is an important enough idea that the release of a stopgap solution like Boot Camp is a good thing.
So are these Leopard loaders a sign that Apple is working on a way to run Windows apps within OS X? Possibly, though if they ran natively, without proper sandboxing, OS X could end up vulnerable to Windows viruses and malware, something Apple obviously wants to avoid.
Whatever the case, the existence of PE loaders in Leopard should add plenty of fuel to fire those pre-Macworld speculations about what Jobs will roll out when he says "and one more thing."
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