Quoting: Guestwine devs don't need to deduce anything

Having an API (description of behavior) and implementing it without having the source is still called reverse engineering, even if they don't need to deduce the required behavior outside of it.

That's what black box idea implies. You can observe the behavior, but you don't know the implementation. So you can implement similar behavior to the best of your ability. It's not a guarantee you won't encounter a case where black box will behave differently, but you are getting close enough to be similar in cases you tested.

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I don't remember the exact example off hand, but I think they did handle some cases of "hidden features" or even bugs that they had to reverse engineer to make things work.

I'm not really familiar with anti-cheat issues, besides that some of them are kernel level rootkits, so you simply can't implement that in userspace which Wine does.

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Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so.

This matches perfectly what Wine does. Arguing against it is just some ridiculous demagoguery I think, especially when this negative argument is hinged on vague criterion of "very little".

There is a case-law mechanism called "clean room design" that is employed to avoid copyright infringement when reverse engineering a proprietary driver.

This idea matches Wine case as well. Particulars like groups in two rooms are the literal source of the term, but it's irrelevant to the concept behind it - avoiding copyright infringement. Are you going to argue you also literally need two rooms to fit it? It would be on the same level as a previous argument.

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Quoting: F.UltraWith Clean Room one usually means the process where one team does look inside, docuements that they see and then you have another team reading that documentating and doing the actual implementation. This is how Phoenix Technologies claimed that they cloned the IBM BIOS, but it's not how Wine is implemented.

Clean room simply means having no access to the original source code therefore avoiding issues with copyright. Documentation or lack of it is irrelevant to this.

Quoting: Guest"Clean room reverse engineering" =/= "reverse engineering".

And it totally is reverse engineering. What's with all this pointless mental gymnastics and arguing semantics for nothing?

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I don't think they'll lie about making something new. But may be they aren't telling all the details. They could surely analyze what Wine is doing instead of reverse engineering what Windows does.

I'm pretty sure they are using Wine in some ways, even if indirectly. The fact that they mentioned having troubles with debugging it shows that they looked at Wine closely.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway, now the only people learning anything about Linux will be three guys at Google developing a compatibility layer. Game developers will just be targeting Windows as usual. So who gives a damn? And since they're inventing their own little wheel (again), they won't be contributing much upstream . . . maybe a bit to DXVK.

What feels even worse here, that they benefit from the work that already went into faudio, dxvk (I assume also vkd3d-proton, since I doubt they don't care about DX12 games) and other similar important projects. Yet they don't give their project back to FOSS at large and Linux gaming in particular. It's Google we are talking about with their money. When they act in parasitic manner while benefiting from open source projects, it just starts feeling disgusting.

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Quoting: tohurAnd if I remember right the Witcher 2 binary was disassembled which uses eON and guess what was found.. mostly WINE related code.. fact is Google can hide this fact cause its on their servers but even for games you are NOT reverse engineering Windows on a whim

That's exactly what I was thinking. Are they building it from the ground up or they are trimming down Wine?

The fact that they are using dxvk and faudio shows they aren't into complete from scratch approach.

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Where is the source code for this? If it's not FOSS - it will be a waste of effort, especially if Google will decide to pull the plug on Stadia.

Same as stuff like eON and Feral's wrapping code basically will be lost to history.

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Will it be open source?

"Making something new is fun" is a legit reason I have no complaints about, but "debugging Wine is hard becasue we are used to Visual Studio" is kind of a bad excuse.

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To use more computing science related idea - "if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck" (also called duck typing). Meaning imitation of behavior in computing can be seen as equivalence, becasue in the end of the day we care about computation result, not necessarily about particulars of the implementation of it.

I have no issue calling this emulation, it perfectly fits the dictionary meaning of the word.

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