Will darling work on x86_64?

2026-07-04 21:58 UTC

(I know the proyect basically just supports cli at the moment) Mac is stopping to support intel and all that from what I understand making mac apps arm only (eventually) (and also hackingtosh impossible but unrelated). The proyect’s page says nothing about this. It does say it also plans to support ios for arm devices which thinking about it would probably also mean running ios apps in android. Regardless, I was saying, wouldn’t running mac apps be impossible without an arm -> x86_64 translation layer/emulator? I know about stuff that do the opposite like box86 or crossover, but yea, idk. Is my thinking incorrect or why is this not mentioned anywhere?

Replies (5)

@Vittelius@feddit.org 2026-07-04 22:09

It would help if you provided a link or something. Because I have no idea what darling is.

Open ##3591579
@hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2026-07-04 22:33

I’m fairly sure if it’s a layer like WINE, which is not an emulator, it won’t be able to run software for a different architecture. I mean if it only translates the system calls, you still need software that runs on your CPU.

Open ##3592084
@bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 2026-07-05 08:29

In theory, Mac’s Mach-O executable format supports multi-architecture binaries that can work on both arm64 and x86_64. But I know nothing about Apple’s plans to drop support for x86_64 in X-Code. After this happen, developers will provide arm64-only binaries.

Open ##3600209
@daggermoon@piefed.world 2026-07-05 08:36

lI’d be shocked if it didn’t support x86.

Open ##3600288
@kayazere@feddit.nl 2026-07-10 06:15

At the moment Darling only supports running x86_64 macOS binaries. There is on going work to make Darling run arm64 macOS binaries, but it hasn’t made much progress recently.

Open ##3710332