Darling Now Embraces AI For Running macOS Binaries On Linux

Darling is the software project more than a decade in development that is designed to run macOS binaries on Linux. This macOS compatibility layer for Linux is now gaining more brisk developments as it turns to AI/LLMs to assist in this creation. Darling has adopted rules for AI-assisted contributions. They argue that large language models can be a very powerful tool and feel its beneficial to their small development team given their very limited resources. "AI changes the equation. What used to be an unsolvable problem with few contributors is now financially realistic, and it lets us compete with Apple on something closer to level ground. ... The policy is how we use this power responsibly. It is written as instructions for AI agents, but it binds the humans using them. Whoever opens a pull request is responsible for every line in it and must be able to explain it in their own words; maintainers' questions get answered by people, not by a bot. The rest of it encodes our clean-room rules: implement the documented contract rather than hacks for a single application, respect the macOS layering, isolate and label undocumented quirks, and never use leaked material or Apple's restricted source such as corecrypto. Nobody should use disassembly to produce matching code. " Via AI-generated patches they have even got the macOS version of the game League of Legends running on Linux. This year various "forks" of Darling appeared that embraced AI generated code and now they are working to get those patches merged into upstream Darling. Darling developers have also rolled out initial support for ARM64. More details on these new developments around the Darling project for macOS software on Linux in the era of AI can be found via the DarlingHQ.org blog.