Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers SE Radio 687: Elizabeth Figura on Proton and Wine
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Sep 25, 2025 In this discussion, Elizabeth Figura, a Wine developer at CodeWeavers, delves into the intricacies of the Wine compatibility layer and Proton. She explains how Wine translates Windows APIs to run applications on non-Windows systems. Elizabeth highlights the challenges of debugging closed-source software and describes performance optimizations that sometimes make Wine faster than native Windows. She outlines Valve's role in enhancing gaming on Linux, along with the history of Wine and its ongoing contributions to game development.
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Use Conformance Tests To Prevent Regressions
- Write automated conformance and regression tests that run on Windows then on Wine to ensure behavior matches.
- Use those tests in continuous integration to catch regressions before shipping changes.
Near-Native Performance Compared To VMs
- Because Wine doesn't emulate CPU instructions, native x86 code runs at near-native speed compared to VM-based CPU emulation.
- Performance differences mainly arise from translating Windows APIs to host equivalents, not instruction interpretation.
Proton: Downstream Wine For Gaming
- Proton is a downstream distribution of Wine with extra hacks and glue to integrate Wine into Steam and ship game-specific fixes quickly.
- Proton merges useful fixes upstream into Wine once they are hardened and reviewed.