Windows-on-Arm won't support win32

[Charles Davis]

On Feb 13, 2012, at 3:20 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:

> According to
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/the-long-kiss-goodbye-for-x86-desktop-windows/19840
> Microsoft is not letting developers use win32 on arm (although
> Microsoft is probably using it themselves for Office on arm).
> Instead, native apps have to use WinRT, a C++-based class library.
As others have pointed out, that's not entirely true. Yes, it's probably written in C++. Yes, two of the interfaces to this are C++ class libraries, one of which requires a special version of C++ (dubbed C++/CX by MS). But WinRT itself is not a C++ class library; it's a COM library with a few extensions to COM. And that means...
> 
> If it takes off, and someone feels like supporting it in Wine,
> they would probably have to start by implementing the first
> bits in C like wine's msvcp support.
...our implementation can be written purely in C the same way all our COM DLLs are.

But that's if it takes off. And I don't see that happening. Personally, I think we should be putting our already strained resources into improving compatibility with Win32. With Microsoft apparently ready to all but abandon Win32, Wine will be more important than ever as a way to run legacy apps that aren't based on WinRT.
> Eventually, if and when llvm gets Visual C++ ABI support,
> maybe wine could start allowing C++ source code.
> 
> (FWIW, I see Charles Davis was working on that,
> http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2010-llvm/updates/list
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2011-March/014305.html
> https://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project/cfe/trunk/lib/CodeGen/MicrosoftCXXABI.cpp
> ).
As an aside, I actually started working on that precisely so Wine could use it :).

Chip