Thanks for the comment! You guessed it, I did use LLMs during development. While the strict definition of a "clean room" design can be debatable when AI is involved, I'd consider this a "light-gray room" approach. There is no direct code plagiarism here: Kakehashi is written from scratch in Rust, whereas Darling is built on C/objc. Furthermore, the architecture is fundamentally different—Darling relies on kernel-level emulation, while Kakehashi is purely focused on a lightweight userspace approach for Linux ARM. In my prompts, I explicitly restricted the use of proprietary components. Ultimately, the codebase speaks for itself, and I welcome everyone to audit the repository! Thanks again!
FWIW Darling runs in userspace too.
What do you mean by "proprietary components"?
Thanks! What I meant is that Kakehashi doesn't require a custom Linux kernel module (LKM). Kakehashi operates completely without root privileges or kernel-level modifications.
By "proprietary components," I meant that in my prompts, I explicitly forbade the copying or direct implementation of private Apple code. Of course, since LLMs are a bit of a black box, it's hard to be 100% certain about everything it synthesized under the hood, but the clear intent was to stick to public ABI definitions and standard open specs.
Darling stopped using the kernel module a year ago.