The developers of the Cutefish distribution, which is developing the eponymous macOS-style desktop environment, have announced the creation of the Reef layer for running macOS applications on Linux. Programs built for macOS are installed from dmg files and integrated with the main desktop on Linux.
Applications run without emulators, virtual machines, or proprietary macOS components. Reef is developed from scratch without using the efforts of the Darling project and without reverse engineering Apple's closed software. During development, functionality is implemented based on the capabilities needed to run specific applications — developers attempt to launch a program, identify non-working features, and implement them. The Reef code has not yet been made public, but soon the layer is promised to be included in the Cutefish distribution.
The layer created by the Cutefish project contains about 460,000 lines of code and uses over 80 external libraries, including macOS components provided by Apple under open licenses, such as Core Foundation (swift-corelibs-foundation), Grand Central Dispatch (swift-corelibs-libdispatch), the standard library for Swift, and libraries like Libc, lzfse, objc4, the linker dyld, and the xnu kernel. The project also utilizes WebKit, LLVM libc++, libc++abi, libunwind, curl, and Tcl. The Core Data API is implemented on top of SQLite, while the Metal graphics API operates on OpenGL. A network framework, support for window auto-saving, and inertia scrolling in the style of macOS are provided.
Among the already running programs on Reef are the RSS reader NetNewsWire, the terminal emulator Ghostty, the archiver Keka, text editors CotEditor and TextMate, the calendar Itsycal, and the note-taking system.
Things 3 and the Speedtest test. When testing performance, macOS applications currently run several times slower; for example, the executable file for CotEditor on Linux starts in 115 ms, while for macOS it takes 235 ms, and the difference in file opening time with 20,000 lines is 0.12 seconds versus 0.50 seconds, keyboard response time is 18 ms versus 21 ms, and rendering time during scrolling is 1.2 ms versus 4.4 ms.
Source: opennet.ru
