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by amlib 906 days ago
Isn't Apple very restrictive about apps that allow running arbitrary code like emulators? I'm also a bit perplexed, unless they have changed their policy recently.
2 comments

That ship has long sailed. There’s an x86 Linux user space emulator capable of running unmodified Alpine Linux, a shell running WASM/WASI binaries…

It seems like the current bar is something like “can it plausibly run something other than pirated Nintendo ROMs”.

What's that x86 Linux emulator app?
That one runs WASM binaries interfacing (via WASI) with the native iOS AArch64 environment and some clever built-in bindings that make iOS look not entirely unlike a normal POSIX.

Very impressive (and faster than emulation, since WASM can be JIT compiled by iOS!), but not Linux :)

I wonder if it was determined that the code isn’t arbitrary, and nothing is being emulated. It’s more like a content engine.

Perhaps ScummVM is closer in concept to something like Super Mario Maker than to a full blown programming environment. You could argue that the custom content is “code” but it’s more like a limited set of actions accompanied with content.