2026-09-21 15:10 UTC
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/117306102597921216
Apple secretly back-ported Core Animation to the 10.4 Tiger fork used by the original ATV, so I extracted the binary, transplanted it into actual Tiger, and now we have Core Animation. A Christmas miracle.
The context is that I'm trying to build 2026 WebKit for 10.4 on Intel, it's going surprisingly well. CSS 3D was a big question mark before this discovery, fonts were also a gap before discovering that Core Text was already in 10.4 as a private framework.
It's not gonna run anywhere Tiger runs; it's heavily tuned for 64-bit Intel. But it should be enough to run actual JS-based pages and maybe even playback 720p video with a little help from ffmpeg. 10.4 technically supports 64-bit processes, but only headless ones. Certainly not AppKit. So I'm experimenting with different splits (64-bit JSCore, 32-bit renderer, 64-bit everything minus the window chrome at the expense of native rendering, etc)
Replies (1)
-
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com 2026-09-21 15:38
@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io you can use `i386_set_ldt` on 64-bit os x to give yourself a 32-bit code segment, maybe you can go the other way and set up a long mode code segment inside of a 32-bit process? or… set up a 32-bit code segment in a 64-bit process, manually map in dyld and the 32-bit frameworks, and jump into dyld_main yourself to host a UI app in a 64-bit process?