Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM

In their "License" section on Github, they write "This project is not derived from Darling." - so they clearly are familiar with it.

I wonder if this project will have any more momentum than Darling or if the set mac=only programs that people want to run on Linux is just too small.

Wine got a lot of support from games, even today productivity apps are often much less supported.

I assume you eventually plan to target binaries that don't already exist on Linux? Where do you think you'll start?

Do you plan on supporting different target versions and implementing similar restrictions to those targets?

eg: older macOS had a writable /usr/ while newer does not without manual effort.

Also, do you plan on having similar cli tools available with similar features ported (maybe from the available Darwin sources?)

eg: can I run a /bin/bash script that expects a macOS environment? Will it get "Darwin" from "uname -o"

Wow! Best of luck with your project. It's truly amazing how our ideas mirrored each other perfectly :)

Thank you very much!

Haha, thanks for the comment!

My previous project had a more traditional name: WIE (Wie is Emulator), which was an attempt to run PE64 binaries on macOS via Cranelift JIT. It was an ironic joke nod to WINE (and it still survives in the GitHub organization name).

For this one, I wanted something more conceptual. Kakehashi (掛け橋) means "bridge" or "go-between" in Japanese. Plus, I just really liked how it sounds and harmonizes with Asahi Linux.

Kakehashi is perfectly fine for the 2/3 of humanity that live in Asia.

Open up your mind and learn other cultures.

Do names have to be English?

What's your use-case? Are you hoping for eventual GUI before it becomes useful, or there's value for you in the CLI?

with games, afaik that is mostly necessary for assets. For an OS, this would basically like a VM and is slower/more overhead.

Thanks for the comment! You guessed it, I did use LLMs during development. While the strict definition of a "clean room" design can be debatable when AI is involved, I'd consider this a "light-gray room" approach. There is no direct code plagiarism here: Kakehashi is written from scratch in Rust, whereas Darling is built on C/objc. Furthermore, the architecture is fundamentally different—Darling relies on kernel-level emulation, while Kakehashi is purely focused on a lightweight userspace approach for Linux ARM. In my prompts, I explicitly restricted the use of proprietary components. Ultimately, the codebase speaks for itself, and I welcome everyone to audit the repository! Thanks again!

Darling is written in a different language so I don't think the LLM would copy paste code from it directly. But it is the main (only?) prior art, so it could be argued that everything the LLM knows about how to do this came because it read and understood Darling, i.e. if Darling didn't exist it may still be able to do this but it would have to figure it out from first principles.

Not saying it happened here, but it's an interesting thought experiment: what if you order an LLm to achieve the same goal as a popular open source project, using all the lessons learned and pitfalls faced by that project, but not to copy the code. Indeed, LLM code is now often better than human code, so direct code copying would be a disadvantage. Humans are certainly inspired by other projects like this all the time and it isn't considered plagiarism.

And that's the intended goal for the project

Based on the commit history, it took about 6 days of active development.

As for the AI assistant, I used Grok 4.5 in Build (Medium, no sub-agents, just standard chats and Plan Mode). I can't track the exact hours, but I spent several full days hyper-focused on this. Naturally, I hit the weekly usage limits all the time and had to sit around waiting for the cooldowns (like now :).

Thanks for the question!

> NEVER ONCE allowed me to post here at all, ever, period.

> My first attempt at posting here was in 2021. That account was shadowbanned within hours, for no discernable reason. I was astounded.

Have you considered emailing hn@ycombinator.com to figure out the problem?

[dead]

Are there any obvious mistakes? Because the way I see it, AI can and the most models actually do write better READMEs than most people ever cared.

I'm not the guy that's banning you.

I come here with the expectation that this isn't 4chan and I leave my opinions exactly as they are while still being polite. This isn't inevitable. Else nobody would use this site. You can be upset about many things like AI and people will share that sentiment or not. You can read the Guidelines, it's not hard to see they aren't unreasonable. And it's easy to see if you violate them.

Thanks for the Death Threat.

Fine. Wishing I burned in a Fire isn't technically a Death Threat. Congratulations.

I have no incentive to be nice either, but I am because I want to. And If you are nice while constructively formulating your anger you don't get banned. easy.

sounds like you are just being an asshole because you hate the general consensus on this site, and can't be bothered to be polite in favor of creating new accounts all the time. That makes you the asshole from my perspective.

Have a great Day.

rust is a tool like any other, grow up.

I personally find it easier to work with than c++ in many cases.

EDIT: On second look... you okay dude? That's an awful lot of anger and swearing for an account created 11 minutes ago. Please calm down for your own sake or do something different at least