The Darling project has allowed the use of AI in development to accelerate support for macOS applications on Linux.

The Darling project, which develops a layer similar to Wine for running macOS applications on Linux, has approved the use of AI tools in development. It is now officially allowed for Darling to incorporate code generated by AI, provided certain requirements are met. This decision comes amid a shortage of developers and resources for the project, as well as a steady increase in the number of proprietary Apple frameworks (where macOS 10.14 had 273 public and 878 private frameworks, macOS 27 has grown to 464 and 2754 respectively).

The new rules are expected to prevent stagnation in development and fragmentation within the community, as well as allow collaboration with developers of forks actively utilizing AI. Such forks have advanced significantly and demonstrate high development speed; for example, the darling-lol fork has achieved launching a macOS build of the game League of Legends, while VibeDarling has succeeded in supporting the ARM64 architecture and running many original macOS applications.

In the next two months, the main team of Darling aims to integrate developments from external forks, using AI tools for merging changes. Official support for i386, x86-64, and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures is also planned, along with providing the capability to run ARM64 builds of applications on x86-64 systems, utilizing the Dynarmic recompiler. Long-term plans include stabilizing compatibility with AppKit and creating proprietary graphical utilities for managing the Darling environment (for instance, a log viewer styled after Console.app), which will also serve as benchmark test applications.

Regarding the acceptance of pull requests with code prepared using AI, they will only be accepted if the developer submitting the change takes responsibility for every line of code, can explain the changes in their own words, and does not use AI when communicating with maintainers. Additionally, strict "clean room" rules are introduced, allowing for the reimplementation of functionality only based on API documentation, header files, standards, RFCs, public sources, and behavior analysis, without using proprietary Apple code, information leaks, or disassembly for direct code recreation.

The Darling project has been developing since 2012 and aims to provide the ability to run Linux applications compiled for macOS without the use of virtualization. It includes a Mach-O executable file loader and a user-space kernel, darlingserver, which implements Mach IPC, POSIX interfaces, and Darwin system calls on top of Linux. Alternative implementations of various Apple frameworks, such as Foundation, AppKit, CoreAudio, and CoreFoundation, are being developed separately. Low-level components like XNU and libSystem are based on the respective open components published by Apple. High-level components are implemented using existing analogs and available libraries. Support for the Metal graphics API is provided through translation to the Vulkan API.

Source: opennet.ru