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Wine is not an emulator



I hate this reply. Wine is not an emulator, but it does emulate Windows('s behavior).


To those who might not be aware: Wine originally stood for "Wine is not an emulator", a recursive acronym that were popular in the geek culture a few decades ago. Same for KDE Desktop Environment and GNU's not Unix.


It *approximates* Windows behaviour and acts as an intermediary layer of "glue logic"

An emulator will generally try to provide an abstracted set of hardware and other features


https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1318672

I guess this falls under "other features" but it's pretty common to emulate systems behavior via a re-implementation, or thunking calls to a copy of the original libraries, etc.

Oracle uses the verb "emulate" to describe branded zones, which function similarly, as well. I think it's semantically fine to call this emulation, it's just high-level emulation.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54762/gitrc.html


Indeed, the technical implementation doesn't matter for the context that it helps to strenghen Windows market position among game studios.




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