Microsoft made a major announcement at WinHEC, earlier this week, that Windows 10 coming to ARM based devices. Its the architecture that powers every mobile device on the planet, and with partnership with Qualcomm next-gem Snapdragon processors will support it.
Whenever platform or architecture changes, there is always concern about how fast the apps will get to the platform. Gladly we have some good news to share. Posted by Twitter user Longhorn, Visual Studio will soon support ARM64, and process of recompiling apps is absolutely painless.
Using an unreleased version of Visual Studio 2015 which supports ARM64 architecture, he has recompiled apps like 7ZIP and Putty. This best part of this proof is that they aren Universal Apps, but WIN32 Apps which means developers won’t have to first port to Universal Apps to make them run on ARM64 bit architecture. All they will need to do is recompile their exiting apps.
So what do the developers do who have UWP Apps? Gladly UWP already supports ARM64. One major reason why Microsoft never stopped rolling out updates for Windows 10 Mobile.
When Microsoft announced Windows 10 on ARM, they where clear that its going to be native experience. This means all the apps that will be compiled, will not be running under any sandbox, but completely native.
What if the developers don’t want to compile? They can skip it as WIN32 apps are supported on 64 bit as well. This is similar to how WIN32 Apps run even if you have 64 bit machine.
Overall this is a good news, at least from Proof of Concept, and since its coming from a developer, it seems pretty legit. Now lets wait for Windows 10 ARM version.
