In my head ARM ties with Linux; this couple builds an unmatched powerful and stabile environment 💪.
x86 ties with PCs/servers, and in the last few years x86 PCs/servers are losing market due to ARM cell phones/servers.
MS married the x86 platform from the beginning, and they always refused to run on any other one (was it a monopoly…?).
Now they changed their mind, making Intel/AMD guys a bit angry.
I hope you're right about ARM64 Windows but… I think the train was lost.
Looking at what's happening with the latest Win11-24H2 updates on x86, I believe (and hope 😉) the time for a relevant ARM64-Win market is far to come.
Anyway, let's get back to “developer mode”.
There are some show-stopper points preventing me to release an ARM64 version of VMS:
- I could cross-compile VMS on x86, but I need an ARM64 device to test it on this platform… and they're not so cheap nowadays.
Actually all of my dev environment is x86-based (mainly on Linux, with some Windows machines).
- VMS actually relies on WinMM, which is still supported on Win11-x86.
I know WinMM is "old" (back from the good Win95 days)… but it's lightweight, still performant and works pretty well.
Switching to DirectX media driver it's a huge lot of work; it also now requires the driver component to be signed (which is too expensive for a free software!).
I can't find any official MS doc about WinMM on ARM64, so I suppose they removed it.
So, even if it could be an interesting challenge, I'm actually not able to develop an ARM64 VMS version, sorry 😔
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