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Comment by reynoldsbd | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all the hate here. Either it will work well or it won't, and the market will decide if it gets to live or die. For a company with resources like Microsoft that has its fingers in so many corners of the market, this seems like a workable, if inelegant, business strategy.

I am much more interested in the technical details of such technology. How are they doing this? Is it pure emulation? JIT transpilation? Does .NET CIL have anything to do with making this "emulation" easy?

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This announcement provides a bit of credibility to the suspicion that Microsoft has been wanting to make a "Surface Phone" device for some time, but was delaying until the right pieces were in place. It is possible they had been working with Intel's Broxton and that chip's cancellation required returning to the drawing board, so to speak.

But it seems likely, to my mind, that what we see today—x86 emulation on a Snapdragon—materialized because Microsoft wants to deliver full Windows 10 on a phone-sized device and Intel wasn't able to give them the necessary platform.

Emulation may be inelegant, but the video [1] confirms performance that would be "good enough" (oh how I hate that phrase) for many users.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U

If it works, how usable would a desktop app run on a phone? I think Microsoft would intend to do this for tablets (which need longer battery life than what Intel provides) rather than a Surface Phone.

A desktop app would probably be tricky to use on a phone screen, but the big idea here is that you can connect the tiny computer in your pocket to a TV or a monitor and have it work just like a laptop, with no OS restrictions.

Maw, the emulation is for binary-only apps.

.NET can already be built to ARM CLR bytecode, or to ARM native/machine code.

This is for apps where you don't, and quite possibly never did, have the source.

Is the ARM CLR bytecode different from the x86 one ? Why ?

I don't think so. Because from my limited tinkering with UWP, I can build a single .appx package and deploy it both to my phone and to my laptop. Am I missing something?

No bytecode binaries run everywhere with a runtime (ms/mono) (and library support for whatever you are running).

This is a terrible strategy for technology early adopters and evaluators though. It's once burned, twice shy for a lot of people and Microsoft have burned a lot of people in the last few years by completely yanking the rug from under "supported" products.

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