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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Linux and Windows have both supported ARM for a while now.

The end goal isn't just using Windows for Windows sake, the reason people use Windows on mac hardware is to get access to apps that run on Windows. And most of those apps still run like garbage (if at all) on the ARM versions of Windows.

They showed Maya (x86 binary) running on their Chip. It has some ability to run intel binaries on Apple silicon through at least two options-emulation and something that sounds like “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word.

I think that is a slightly different use case, though. That demo was an x86 binary running on ARM MacOS via a translation layer. So if there is a MacOS x86 version of the app you want to run, that might be an option.

But I know a lot of people still run Windows because they want the Windows version of an app, either because it isn't available at all on Mac or just because the Windows version runs better (Excel was a classic example of this for a long time, might still be). In that case, I don't know if that same translation layer will have the same performance (if it can run at all outside of MacOS) when running an entirely different OS.

FWIW I remember running PowerPC binaries on Intel macs via Rosetta was pretty painless. They mentioned explicit support for linux/windows emulation so they know it’s an important use case.

They did not mention windows emulation, only Linux/docker.

I don't believe Rosetta will work for linux/windows VMs.

> “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word.

I think this is called "transpiling" -- a version of compiling that's mainly translating from another architecture. And it didn't sound from their description like it was JIT -- it sounded like it would do the transpile when you first installed it (or maybe first ran it?) and keep the results.

Transpiling (as much as I hate that word, because the more you know about compilers, the more meaningless it is), is about source to source translations, not binary translation.

And they have a first pass AOT, with a JIT backup from the sounds of it to support JITs like browsers, node, and java.

But you still need ARM specific binaries. If your software doesn’t support your specific flavor of ARM, then you’re out of luck.

(I recently tried to install Zoom on arm64 Debian and it didn’t go so well... Rstudio wasn’t even close to an option)

I found the same problem when I tried running off Pi OS 64-bit for a day—almost every app that _did_ have a Linux binary available was only able to run under x86_64, not on arm64... More here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

Zoom, Bluejeans, Dropbox, pretty much all the popular apps I used where I could find a Linux version for my Dell laptop, I couldn't find a way (though got close at least, with Dropbox) to run them on an ARM64 CPU.

Have you tried box86? https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 Let's you run x86 (not x86_64 though) programs on ARM Linux. It does a neat thing where system library calls are converted to ARM system library calls rather than using x86 ones for better performance.

Lots of games work fine with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4aGNqZ724

For Dropbox, you could quite trivially get by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Rclone is what I ended up using and it worked decently well.

Dropbox could run relatively well with qemu user mode.

...and we need new, more hardware for CI/CD that's just dedicated for Apple OSes. Pretty sure we won't be able to use the 5 unused raspberry pi we have.

Like, a joke version of Windows, yes. As a developer, if my machine can't run Visual Studio then it's not interesting to me at all. I can see it being acceptable to people who work predominantly with tools that have an ARM binary though.

VSCodium works great on ARM64, I was testing it last week when I tried doing some dev work from a Raspberry Pi running the beta 64-bit OS: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

Visual studio code has an arm build now [0]. I don't know what regular VS is written on but assuming it's .NET framework I assume a build will show up as the framework itself improves on ARM.

[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/tag/1.46.1 (basically just MS source minus branding)

VS Code is not what anyone means by Visual Studio in that context. No one uses Windows for VS Code.

Of course VS Code works on ARM, it's an electron app.

VS is not built on top of dotNET.

VS Code was expected to run on anything, being nothing more than Javascript & HTML wrapped via Electron.

I known in 2010 the Visual Studio UI was rewritten in WPF/CSharp, I don't know which UI system they are using in 2019. It is documented in the wiki entry and a few blog posts MS made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio

Visual Studio proper is a mix of C/C++, .NET, and COM.

I use Visual Studio, but I could just as easily use JetBrain’s Rider and be just as content.

Windows on ARM can run vsCode fine now. Traditional VS is on the way, but you can run x64 Windows apps on ARM.

Source?

VS is not even 64-bit yet...

> Linux and Windows have both supported ARM for a while now.

Many people who want dual boot Windows/ Macs want them for games and gamers want the sort of performance you don't get with emulation.

Unless the new ARM chips can handle VirtualBox well, I’ll pick up the last intel model. I have to work with old ASP apps in IE VMs side-by-side with stuff on my Mac every day.

IE is dead and will be gone before Intel Macs are.

I know, that’s why I run it in compatibility mode in a VM. Just because it’s dead, doesn’t mean there aren’t organizations that have built mission critical web apps that only work in IE and those of us who have the burden of dealing with them.

You’ll be able to do that for so long that by then you can emulate the whole OS it runs on in a web browser. It’s obsolete after all.

If it uses the virtualization kit, it shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately only veertu, xhive, and part of parallels do so

Unless it only allows ARM VMs.

They demoed Parallels running an x86 Debian VM

Where did it say x86?

What's the state of using cloud Windows images vs. local for this sort of testing?

Dunno. The free Windows VMs I have saved can be reloaded in VirtualBox and used pretty much forever. They can’t run any serious software very well (on my old MacBook anyway), but I’m just using them to support some legacy web apps.

Nobody cares about windows per se. People want to run legacy win32 x86 and x64 binaries.

Not necessarily. I'm working on some hard-core Excel spreadsheets, so the simplest solution was to run Office on Windows 10 in Parallels.

Sounds like you wanted to run office, not windows, which was exactly my point.

Ok, the lack of commas made it seem to me you were only talking about legacy software.

Zoom does not release binaries for ARM linux.

No-one runs Linux on Apple laptops these days; it's completely impractical. On OS X, Zoom will obviously recompile their app for the new architecture.

I am – right now even – but I agree it's become impractical.

This announcement is the final nail in the coffin I suppose. I hope some company will come out with great quality, well-designed, minimal laptops. That run Linux perfectly.

If it ran Linux perfectly, it could only do so if the manufacturer maintained its own Linux distribution. Laptop hardware and power management is just too complicated these days for anything else to work well.

All the Linux users I know prefer to use Zoom in the browser.

Windows have both supported ARM for a while now

Windows has always been cross-platform, x86, MIPS, Alpha and PPC back in the day. There was even a SPARC build at one point.

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