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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

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chrisseaton·

Presumably you’d run the AArch64 Windows builds, not the AMD64 builds, if you were on an Apple Silicon machine.

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That doesn't help you if the particular Windows software you need to run hasn't been built for ARM.

People run Windows for the software library - not because they really like Windows.

Windows for ARM can already run 32-bit x86 executables. They’re working to bring similar support for 64-bit software.

Thanks for posting that. It was news to me; I haven't been following Windows on ARM, but am now interested due to Apple's upcoming hardware.

I was under the impression (like many others apparently) that Windows 10 ARM64 wouldn't be very useful (since so few native apps are available), but being able to run 32-bit (x86) apps is huge:

Running 32-bit Applications https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winprog64/run...

I’m not sure what people can reasonably expect - you want to run one OS, virtualising another OS for a completely different architecture? You should probably just run a separate machine for a better experience at this point.

Exactly! I don't think most people understand how bad this move to ARM will be for developers. You are losing the ability to run/test/develop the vms and containers that are deployed in prod.

aarch64 windows isn't useful to many (most?) people

Most people don't even know what an architecture or ISA is ;-) But in terms of usefulness people will want to be able to execute their tasks and if a program that they use doesn't work (be it because it doesn't have an AArch64 version or anything else) they will not find that very useful.

I think you were mostly pointing at Windows's ARM failure so far, which is fair -- a lot of applications simply won't run unless they make an ARM specific version or have a binary that happens to be compatible with the Windows built in x86 emulator

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