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darlinghq
darling
Objective-C2015–2026
darlinghq / darling

darling

Darwin/macOS emulation layer for Linux

28Distinct people
29Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Darwin/macOS emulation layer for Linux

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year29 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-11-01 03:07:46 UTC to 2026-09-02 07:58:18 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Quick links Website • Community Discord • Bug Tracker Introduction Darling is a runtime environment that allows running macOS applications on Linux without a virtual machine. It consists of a Mach-O binary loader and a userspace kernel server (darlingserver) that implements macOS's Mach IPC, POSIX, and Darwin syscall interfaces on top of Linux — along with reimplementations of Apple's frameworks, such as Foundation, AppKit (based on Cocotron), CoreAudio, and CoreFoundation. Darling's low-level components (XNU, libSystem, Security) are based on Apple's open-source releases. Higher-level frameworks are being actively reimplemented, with many CLI tools already functional. GUI application support is in active development, backed by an AppKit implementation and an initial Metal backend powered by Vulkan translation. The code of Darling is licensed under GNU GPL 3.0. Individual submodules may be licensed differently, as indicated within each of them. Install Official packages for some distributions are available under releases. Community Packages CautionThese packages are neither maintained nor vetted by the Darling team. Use them at your own risk. For a list of community packages, see the Community Packages section in the Darling documentation. Build Instructions For build instructions, visit Darling Docs. Usage Prefixes Darling has support for DPREFIXes, which are very similar to WINEPREFIXes. They are virtual “chroot” environments with a macOS-like filesystem structure, where you can install software safely. The default DPREFIX location is ~/.darling, but this can be changed by exporting an identically named environment variable. A prefix is automatically created and initialized on first use. Please note that we use overlayfs for creating prefixes, and so we cannot support putting prefix on a filesystem like NFS or eCryptfs. In particular, the default prefix location won't work if you have an encrypted home directory. Hello world Let's start with a Hello world: $ darling shell echo Hello world Hello world Congratulations, you have printed Hello world through Darling's OS X system call emulation and runtime libraries. Installing software Working with .pkg files You can install .pkg packages with the installer tool available inside shell. It is a somewhat limited cousin of OS X's installer: $ darling shell Darling [~]$ installer -pkg mc-4.8.7-0.pkg -target / Darling does not support installing .mpkg files yet The Midnight Commander package from the above example is available for download. You can uninstall and list packages with the uninstaller command. Working with DMG images DMG images can be attached and detached from inside darling shell with hdiutil. This is how you can install Xcode along with its toolchain and SDKs (note that Xcode itself doesn't run yet): Darling [~]$ hdiutil attach Xcode_7.2.dmg /Volumes/Xcode_7.2 Darling [~]$ cp -r /Volumes/Xcode_7.2/Xcode.app /Applications Darling [~]$ export SDKROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk Darling [~]$ echo 'void main() { puts("Hello world"); }' > helloworld.c Darling [~]$ /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/clang helloworld.c -o helloworld Darling [~]$ ./helloworld Hello world Congratulations, you have just compiled and run your own Hello world application with Apple's toolchain. Working with XIP archives Xcode is now distributed in .xip files. These can be installed using unxip: cd /Applications unxip Xcode_11.3.xip
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

29 sources
Having experienced how much LLMs can help with reverse-engineering stuff, I wonder why such projects don't actually see unusual development speed-up. The things that are possible now with a fraction of time were previously reserved to the elite few. EDIT: although it looks like some try, e.g. https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1776 https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-xnu/pull/16 Sadly, the fact that there's no response to some serious, months-old PRs implementing major frameworks (https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1725, https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/pull/1724) is not exactly a sign of an actively-managed project. Hopefully someone steps in or forks it.
In Run macOS Software on Linux
Wine has been going for a very long time - since 1993. When it started Windows was a lot smaller, so getting Windows 3.1 programs working was probably enough. There's too much history to cover in a quick comment. Wine has a lots of things that help - the compatibility database https://appdb.winehq.org/ is a good place for people to submit info on apps for instance, there's also a big test suite that runs against Windows + Wine. Both of these have been around since the 1990s - Darling is at an earlier stage, but once GUI apps run better both of those are good ideas to adopt. I think Darling probably needs more people working on it. The whole are of Metal on Vulkan looks interesting https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/issues/390#issuecomment...
In Run macOS Software on Linux
Their GitHub is active, and they have a Discord. I don’t do Discord, but if you do, you could probably follow their progress on there. As of 2020, graphical app support appeared to be basic but somewhat functional: https://github.com/darlinghq/darling/issues/657 I agree that GUI apps are the real use case here. Honestly, reversing and recreating the MacOS APIs is such a mammoth effort though, I can understand why progress would be slow. Wine faced a similar struggle, but also had an urgent need driving it: we needed Win apps to work to make Linux viable for most people. That’s less the case for Mac apps, so Darling is by necessity more of a passion project.
In SheepShaver: macOS run-time environment for BeOS and Linux

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