austanss wrote:
There have been many notable attempts at supporting another operating system's software, to varying degrees of success. The (esoteric) Longene project, the entirety of the 20-year-old ReactOS project, Wine, and even Managarm who aims for source compatibility rather than binary compatibility.
I think it's worth noting that you've overlooked the whole POSIX ecosystem, of which Managarm here is just the most recent of possibly hundreds of OSs. POSIX and the preceeding Standard Unix standardised the many Unix-like and Unix-compatible OSs which appeared in the 80s if not the late 70s. Compatibility has always been source-level only and has always required patches, but at least you
can patch. It has its difficulties but I find it less painful than any other form of compatibility. Well, no, there are frameworks, sometimes attached to languages, which try to work the same way on every OS they support. Those are nice, though there are gotchas such as Windows file semantics and performance characteristics being substantially different from POSIX's.