Hello All,
My name is Jonathan Clark, and I work with a team on a project that has
some similarities with Wine. The project is called Thinstall
(http://thinstall.com), and on first glance similarities may not be
apparent. Thinstall allows Win32 applications to run (on Windows) from a
network share or usb flash drive with zero install. It isn't meant to allow
applications to run cross platform like wine, but it is similar in that it
replaces the Windows loader for loading EXEs & DLLs, doing things like
mapping, imports, and thread/process management. It also replaces ~400
Win32 api functions in order to allow applications to run instantly in a
sandbox so they don't need to touch the local filesystem or registry. Our
approach is all in user mode so that applications can run under any login
account without needing admin rights or drivers. Thinstall packages the
entire application into a single EXE file and then tacks on it's runtime
(300k on disk) so apps can be distributed and run as a single file that
doesn't need to decompress to disk.
The challenges in creating Thinstall are many of the same ones that Wine
faces, achieving a high degree of compatibility in replacement functions
means you need to be good at debugging and understanding the internals of
Windows. Since most code can be run by multiple threads, it is also
important to understand thread safety and have a lot of experience working
through these types of issues.
Thinstall is now about 6 years old and we are coming up on a version 3.0
release. Thinstall is a commercial product and everyone works full time
with funding coming from our customers. Recently we've done fairly well
financially and have the opportunity to try to take the product and company
to the next level by hiring a couple of senior engineers. This brings me to
why I'm posting here..
If you are experienced with Windows internals, have experience
reimplementing Win32 APIs, and you are interested in some contract or
full-time work please let me know. We are located in San Francisco,
California (awesome town) and ideally I'd like to work with people locally.
We can help with a move if needed. Otherwise, if you are outside of the USA
- we could talk about doing something remotely.
I hope to hear from you.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Clark
P.S. As background info, I used to be heavily in the linux space when I
co-founded a video game company "Crack dot com" which made the linux port of
Doom & Quake as well as developed the original titles Abuse and Golgotha. I
have been aware of wine for a long long time and I'm impressed by the
quality of work by all the developers and how far it has come.
P.S.S. I subscribed in digest mode so if you reply to the list, keep in mind
I won't see it until tomorrow.
