On: Microsoft launches Windows 10 on ARM

[molsson]

It's obviously not easy by any stretch of the imagination to port something as complex as Windows to a new platform, but I'm still surprised it took THAT long to finish this.

[com2kid → molsson]

Windows has been running on ARM for ages. Windows RT was an early go, but even before that internal builds of Windows for ARM were kept around.

Windows Phone 8 ran on the Windows 8 kernel, and Windows 10 Mobile ran on the Win10 kernel.

It seems like the hard part here was doing the seamless emulation of x86 apps. Writing a production quality general purpose emulator is hard.

[coredog64 → com2kid]

It's not like Microsoft doesn't have examples to draw on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

[megy → molsson]

Who says that it was just finished recently? There are a large number of things that go into projects like this, Windows could have been ported years ago, but they were not ready.

[criddell → molsson]

No kidding. This was announced in 2011, right?

NT was available on Intel, Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS chips. I'm surprised it was that hard to add ARM. Or is this something different?

[poizan42 → criddell]

What do you think the Surface was running? After it got jailbroken people even compiled lots of different Win32 applications and ran it on it.

[criddell → poizan42]

That wasn't the same thing though, was it? This isn't Windows RT v2, is it?