Darling's predecessor, maloader, presented a maximalist approach to the problem by trying to replicate everything that Apple's dynamic library loader dyld does.

This proved to be hard, and since a 2017 "Mach-O transition" Darling has been using a lightweight loader just enough to launch the open-source Apple dyld instead.

[10] Some licensing issues exist [citation needed] in the darling-mach module, as the team are adding GNU GPL modifications to the APSL kernel.

The frameworks and system libraries in Darling are, to the best possible extent, based on source code released by Apple.

[9] To fill in the gaps for many higher-level frameworks like Cocoa, Darling uses code from Cocotron, ApportableFoundation, and GNUstep.