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Windows 10 On ARM Will Support x86 Apps From Outside the Store (liliputing.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: First announced last year, Microsoft provided an update on Windows 10 ARM at the MS Build developer conference today. And the company confirmed that not only would Windows 10 ARM be able to run legacy apps developed for computers with x86 processors but you'd be able to just download any old Win32 app from the internet, install it, and run it on a computer running Windows 10 ARM. In other words, Windows 10 S runs on devices with ARM or x86 processors, but only supports Windows Store apps. Windows 10 ARM only runs on devices with ARM chips... but supports apps from pretty much any source. Developers don't need to convert their software in any way, because Windows 10 ARM includes a built-in emulation layer that allows Win32 apps to run on an ARM-powered system. But Microsoft demonstrated how you could download a common program like 7zip from the internet and simply install it on a device with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. Of course, developers can also package software optimized for ARM as Universal Windows Platform apps for distribution in the Windows Store. But they don't necessarily have to.
The Windows 10 nightmare continues. I haven't read one single good news about that damn OS ever since it was released. Prior to it, everyone was saying how it was finally gonna bring back the real Windows, but what we got was pure sadism in software form. And it keeps changing around. It's surreal.
So, W10ARM runs on ARM and runs ARM and Win32 apps from anywhere; mobile devices have a dock for large screen, kb & mouse; and ARM devices are pretty much mobile phones and tablets.
Is this the converged device businesses have been looking for?
I'm in software licence management, so converging devices can simplify management effort considerably...
Advances in interoperability, but still a horror show in privacy or autonomy.
On the other hand, virtualization has made giant strides since then, and Microsoft has needed for some time a viable presence in the ARM arena. There was WinCE, (pronounced "wince") and Surface RT, (motto: good luck finding apps) and now there's Win10 Arm (or whatever they're calling it). Hopefully it'll be more successful than the first two. But I can't read "it'll run this, it'll run that, it'll run everything! isn't that exciting!" without thinking of that IBM guy all those years ago.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Reminds me of MacOS emulation for powerpc/m68k. Sounds good in theory but becomes extremely slow in practice.
This is not just emulating API calls like Wine or containing supervisor mode like most virtualization systems, this is machine language translation on the fly (mame).
Binary translation has always been slow and unreliable, with the sole exception of arcade games in mame.
Now if they were trying to emulate ARM on Intel, that would be much more interesting, especially if Intel got involved and provided microcode to directly run ARM machine code..... can't do that in ARM.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Having been through the OSX transition from PPC to x86 this sounds very much like they've bought in Transitive's technology to allow them to dynamically recompile x86 native applications (I refuse to call them 'apps') to run on ARM. Apple handled this pretty well and there was very little that didn't work. We lost MacOS9 support, but we gained performance for native applications and PPC binaries actually ran surprisingly well if they were mostly GUI based. I did compile a few command line tools and run them under Rosetta and they were about 10x slower than native (still impressive honestly) but for something like MS Word the hit was much less. Today I can still run Word 2004 on my x86 MacBook under VMware which allows me to run Snow Leopard and it runs faster than the native Word 2016 I have on macOS Sierra. Go figure. Anyway, this is something MS should have done from the start as the technology was already out there but I suspect politically they wanted to push the store apps (yeah, those are apps) rather than let people continue running their old x86 binaries. That worked well for them didn't it?......
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I give you half a clap, for being too late at adding this in Windows RT and basically everything Microsoft did to chase Google/Apple in the mobile ecosystem.
Part of the reason Windows 7 became the successor to windows xp and windows vista is the "xp mode". A VM designed to be well integrated lay for previous software compatibility.
This ARM emulator layer might not be prefect or even fully feasible, but it should be good enough to actually put consumers on ARM windows. It will also retain some windows developers from leaving windows as the market shift to mobile. Not that I encourage any of that because Microsoft been a d**k pushing people to Windows 10.
Unfortunately at the current stage, it's only making windows on mobile semi-relevant as a lot of consumers and developers have already left windows.
I'm wondering how software with in-process code generation (such as LuaJIT, Smalltalk VMs, Lisps etc.) is going to fare.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is a good thing. Like the 68k->PowerPC, and then the PowerPC->Intel transition - you've got to start somewhere, or you're stuck on one architecture forever.
I see the negativity in many of the posts. I don't understand it. You have to make a start somehow, and this is a good one. If you then allow cross compilation in Visual Studio, then you're essentially taking the same approach Apple did to manage its transitions, and those transitions were damned near seamless. Thanks Microsoft for trying to move and do something different. And yes, I really mean that.
Microsoft seems determined to splinter Windows into multiple versions with variable types of app support. Its going to seriously confuse the average user. I do not know what choice many will have to move beyond Windows, but I am certain this is a opportunity for other operating systems to take advantage. At this point, if I am going to be locked into a wall garden I think I will choose Apple or Google over Microsoft.
Actually I just don't want to be constrained by what they say I can have from the App Store
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I wish all modern OS's would do this. There is a lot of legacy software out there that we still need and far more that would just be nice to have access to such as children's educational software that was never remade for the new OSs. Right now a lot of businesses, and families, end up having to maintain old computers to access that older software, some of which is mission critical. The modern hardware has plenty of computing power to do the emulation and modern security methods means it can be sandboxed to run safely.
I hope to see both Microsoft and Apple offering legacy support and even crossover support.
and Chromebooks aren't quite giving it.
Um, you know MS had exactly this sort of technology on Windows back in the early 90s right? When Windows NT ran on DEC Alphas as well?
MS arguably did it better - they didn't need to emulate the OS because they could recompile it for Alpha (as they do now for ARM). Win NT has always been a portable OS. Apple only had to emulate OS level stuff because they wrote hardware-specific stuff into the OS in the first place.