Also,
> I'm already putting the ARM code inside all my binaries.
Wait, I thought CPU architecture was the one limitation that did affect APE - you mean on unix-likes APE binaries are already compatible across amd64 and aarch64?
Edit: rereading https://justine.lol/cosmo3/ it does say that, doesn't it - and ARM64 listing "Windows (non-native)" just means that one platform uses (for the next few hours-days, at least...) emulation. That's amazing:)
Parallels has a Microsoft partnership and has an official AMR64 image which I was able to grab (and run in anything). I’m sure there are a lot more now, though!
If you have an Apple Silicon machine you can run a Windows Insider build via UTM in a VM.
EDIT: Or maybe what you're looking for is hybrid PEs? https://ffri.github.io/ProjectChameleon/new_reloc_chpev2/
Down the rabbit hole...
> buy a Windows ARM computer
You can still get Surface Pro X (16G/LTE) on Amazon for $800
It seems like this is when you have the source or the libs but choose to mix x86 and arm?
It would seem if you have the source etc you should just bite the bullet and port everything.
* Allows incremental porting of large codebases to ARM. (It's not always feasible to port everything at once-- I have a few projects with lots of hand-optimized SSE code, for example.)
* Allows usage of third-party x64 DLLs in ARM apps without recompilation. (Source isn't always available or might be too much of a headache to port on your own.)
Wouldn't it make more sense to have a translator that translates the assembly, instead of an emulator that runs the machine code?
So if you're doing incremental stuff might as well stub out the calls with "not implemented", and start filling them in.
These sorts of things are only conceived in conversations between two huge corporations.
Like Microsoft needs game developers to build for ARM. There’s no market there. So their “people” author GPT-like content at each other, with a ratio of like 10 middlemen hours per 1 engineer hour, to agree to something that narratively fulfills a desire to build games for ARM. I can speculate endlessly how a conversation between MS and EA led to this exact standard but it’s meaningless, I mean both MS and EA do a ton of things that make no sense, and I can’t come up with nonsense answers.
Anyway, so this thing gets published many, many months after it got on some MS PM’s boss’s partner’s radar. Like the fucking devices are out! It’s too late for any of this to matter.
You can’t play Overwatch on a Snapdragon whatever (https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/gaming-laptops/emulation-pr... ) End of story. Who cares what the ABI details are.
Microsoft OWNS Blizzard and couldn’t figure this out. Whom is this for?
Arm64EC is not new. It was released back in 2021.
> ...Intel could've made ARM32/64-mode segments a reality...
While I myself admire this particular breed of masochism, the direction that Intel currently wants to take is apparently quite the opposite.
In May last year, they proposed X86S[1][2][3] which tosses out 16-bit support completely, along with 32 bit kernel mode (i.e. the CPU boots directly into 64 bit mode, 32 bit code is only supported in ring 3).
The proposal trims a lot of historical baggage, including fancy segmentation/TSS shenanigans, privilege rings 1 & 2, I/O port access from ring 3, non-flat memory models, etc... limiting the CPU to 64 bit kernel mode, and 64 or 32 bit x86 user mode. With the requirement for 64 bit kernel mode, it effectively also removes un-paged memory access.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#X86S
[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
If anyone actually has a serious need to use ancient 16 bit software, emulators like 86Box work very well. Software that old doesn’t really need performance faster than, say, a Pentium 90, which 86Box has no trouble achieving on my M1 (ARM) MacBook.
You can also use winevdm[1] on modern 64 bit Windows operating systems. I have this in production use for a niche case where someone can’t give up a particular 16 bit app, and I didn’t want to tangle with a VM for them.
The technical details of making sure a modern CPU still functions exactly like an 80386, which in turn made sure it functioned like an 80286, when you fire up a 16 bit task on, say, 32-bit Windows 10 (or 64-bit with something like winevdm[1]) sound like a nightmare for a microcode engineer or QA tester.
It's not just Intel. It's clear that ARM is also going in the same direction, by allowing newer cores to be 64-bit (AArch64) only, dropping compatibility with the older 32-bit ARM ISA (actually three ISAs: traditional 32-bit ARM, Thumb, and Thumb2), and IIRC some manufacturers of ARM-based chips are already doing that.
All of that is a tiny amount of die area relative to the whole CPU. After all, a 386 has only 275k transistors.
X86S is Stupid. Intel apparently forgot what made them worth choosing over competitors like ARM and now RISC-V. Non-compatible x86 makes little sense.
...and if they want to include the virtualisation extension, they still need to include that backwards-compatible functionality.
So what should developers do re: Win10 users? Separate builds for them?
The last build of win10 on arm supported x64 and many of us who do not want win11 still use it.
In reality, yes, different builds, like it already happened with previous Windows versions.
If you meant x86 win10 users you can use the win11 sdk to target them
Snapdragon 835 is also horribly slow.
If not, is this not just another target architecture? You cannot use it on arm64 architectures, and your app already supports x86.
Everything seems to converge more and more toward RISC-V these days.
