Next year Microsoft plans to roll out a version of Windows 10 that will let you run classic Windows apps on a device with a 64-bit ARM-based processors including the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip.
This would hardly be the first version of Windows for ARM, but it is expected to be one of the first to use emulation to let you run unmodified Win32 apps such as Adobe Photoshop.
But if developers take an extra step and recompile their software to support ARM64 chips, then you don’t need emulation… which could lead to better performance. And one developer has already begun recompiling open source apps to support ARM64 architecture.
Twitter user @never_released (Longhorn) has released ARM64 Windows builds of two apps so far, file compression utility 7-Zip, and SSH client PuTTY.
The apps were compiled using an unreleased build of Visual Studio 2015 with ARM64 support, and they’re compiled to run on an operating system that’s not publicly available yet (Windows 10 for ARM64), so there’s no way for most people to try the software or port their own apps just yet.
But it does show that developers who want to port Win32 apps to run on ARM natively will be able to do so, rather than relying on the emulation technology built into the operating system.
via MS Power User
