We are very excited to say that in Q2 2019 (April 1 to June 30) we saw more community involvement than ever before. Many pull requests were submitted that spanned from bug fixes for our low level assembly to higher level modules such as the AppKit framework. Thanks to everyone for your contributions and we hope for this level of engagement to continue.
Darling made good progress in the first quarter of 2019. A total of 13 issues were closed from January 1, 2019 to March 30, 2019. The work continues for GUI app support. The thing holding us back the most was a lack of support for running a debugger (lldb) in Darling. Last summer, Luboš took care of this complicated task which involved delving into Darling's multithreading and Mach APIs in #304 and was capped off with loading Mach-O binaries in the kernel with #364.
In the meantime, Sergey has been putting a lot of work into getting our new Cocoa stack to work and has produced exciting results. The last thing preventing us from announcing and shipping basic GUI application support is trouble around loading Linux's native OpenGL drivers and other files. Loading native Linux things doesn't reliably work with our current mechanism for filesystem virtualization, which is based on mount namespaces and chrooting.
Luboš is working on a replacement that we have dubbed "vchroot" (virtual chroot) that will be a one-time fix for this issue, but progress has been stalled due to time constraints. We would also like to welcome Jack Howell as the newest member of the project! Below are a few accomplishments which we would like to highlight.