Windows-on-Arm won't support win32

[Reece Dunn]

On 13 February 2012 22:20, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> 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.

WinRT consists of:

1.  a cutdown set of the Win32 API (including subsets of DirectX 11,
DirectWrite, etc);
2.  an extension to COM that provides .NET-style metadata about
objects via IInspectable and other APIs (akin to IDispatch);
3.  a set of APIs that build on top of (2), including a Metro-specific XAML API;
4.  bindings to the WinRT COM API via (a) C++ extensions (think
_bstr_t and friends or ATL with language extensions similar to
C++/CLI, but compiling to native COM code), (b) .NET (through the .NET
runtime) and (c) HTML/JavaScript via the IE10 JavaScript platform.

So C++ code is not needed to implement the WinRT API: it can be
handled through the existing COM in C mechanisms that Wine uses.

- Reece