filo

July 27, 2026, 4:45pm 1

Beer

I’ve always been fascinated by Wine, I’m using it since I was a kid.
A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to learn how it works and what it actually does under the hood, and to do that I started my own Wine clone named beer!

It doesn’t do very much a the moment, It can execute a simple program that starts and exits
with a status code for now, but seeing a Windows program running on Linux thanks to my code is worth sharing for me :slight_smile:
I’m learning a lot about Windows internals with this project and I’m starting to appreciate its architecture, not everything is slop like the latest Windows version.

The development process is really cool, feels like creating an operating system, but in userland, if that makes any sense.

If you want to try it, you can compile src/win_program.exe for x86_64-windows and see it in action.

Check the repo for a quck demo :smiley:

Yeah, a lot of the internals, especially the Windows NT kernel, is actually well thought out.
And very far away from Unix, spurred by the fact that the creator actively disliked Unix’s design.

It’s an interesting thought process to imagine how the IT world would look like if Microsoft hadn’t gone down the enshittification route.