Re: Cider: Native Execution of iOS Apps on Android

[David Chisnall]

On 14 May 2014, at 14:43, Tobias Platen <tobias@platen-software.de> wrote:

> No hardware emulation but software emulation. The whole Apple software
> runs on android including the xnu kernel. Currently I am trying to do
> the very same with gnumach and linux.

They do some nice tricks to graft the XNU code into Linux, but it's 
conceptually quite similar to the foreign ABI layers most *NIX systems have, 
although they have per-thread kernel-ABI contexts to allow a single program to 
make both XNU and Linux system calls, depending on where it is.  The other 
quite neat thing is their library that allows calling between libraries using 
slightly different ABIs.  This is not a new technique either (Transitive / 
Manchester pioneered a lot of this work over a decade ago), but it means that 
you can use native Android libGL (for example) from an iOS app.

It's a research project not a serious product though, because it relies on 
using a load of Apple libraries that they don't have a license to use on 
Android.

David

-- Sent from my Apple II