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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 on ARM (to be released later this year) includes x86 emulation to support 32-bit x86 desktop applications on ARM. I assume Intel is talking about Microsoft.

A couple of demos of Microsoft's x86 emulation. It seems to work well:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSXUDKpkbx4

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Heh, and Android on x86 includes ARMv7 emulation to support 32b NDK apps on x86. libhoudini, written and still maintained, by Intel.

Though 32 bit apps will get rarer. They will need to have a solution for 64bit apps.

Maybe they think most of those can be recompiled?

If the developper is convinced there is a big enough market

Maybe if Microsoft stops shipping 32-bit OSes. But if your app needs to run on 32-bit Windows, and your app isn't one that would benefit much from 64-bit, why bother releasing a 64-bit version? It's just one more build to keep track of, and one more source of bugs.

The WOW64 layer has a few caveats. For instance, filesystem virtualization means that users of your app may see different content in a "File > Open" dialog than they would in an Explorer window.

Well, I would imagine they're hoping we go straight from 32-bit Win32 to UWP which compiles for ARM automatically. I doubt anyone today is releasing 64-bit only apps, and Win 10 for ARM is almost here, so the selection of 64-bit only apps probably will never grow too large. For developers who want to avoid UWP, they can continue to compile for both 32-bit and 64-bit as we've been doing for years.

> For developers who want to avoid UWP

For those paying attention to the BUILD talks, those developers will be gently dragged into UWP thanks to Desktop Bridge, regardless how they feel about it.

New Office version for Windows 10 will be UWP only.

CP/M, MS-DOS and Win16 compatibility were eventually removed.

MS-DOS and Win16 compatibility is NOT removed in 32-bit Windows.

I was thinking about 64 bit and future hardware only.

I don't think about 32-bit Windows since I left XP.

For what it's worth, in that first video where they say the video is running "really smoothly", the video is visibly chugging (though maybe that's just due to recording).

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