Some of you might not have noticed because, until recently, most people didn’t think much about Windows ARM. After all, nearly everyone still runs Windows on x86-64 CPUs. But lately, Windows on ARM is starting to get more traction, both in the press and in the market.

Back in May, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows. This is supposed to be a $900 mini PC (about the size of a Mac mini) for developing Windows ARM apps for the Snapdragon X Elite SoC (system on a chip). I say “supposed to be” because although the press release says it was intended to go on sale on June 18, I can only find pre-order pages for it, so it seems to not be available just yet or out-of-stock.

There have been other ARM PCs for Windows in the past, but their performance has always been less than desirable. The new Snapdragon X Elite is supposed to be roughly equivalent to Apple M3 SoCs.

You don’t have to wait for Qualcomm as Copilot+ PCs and laptops with Snapdragon SoCs are starting to appear elsewhere. Lenovo has the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, which at about $1700 is not exactly a bargain, but is in the ballpark of many Mac laptops. The Yoga Slim 7x is even cheaper starting at just $1200.

But I’m not here to sell Lenovo products. I’m just pointing out that Windows on ARM is becoming a reality, if slowly. That might be starting to change given Intel’s recent troubles with its Raptor Lake CPUs and most recent earnings report, however. Take it with a grain of salt, but Qualcomm is predicting that Windows ARM could reach 50% of Windows PC market within five years.

That sounds astonishing, but change often happens slowly then all at once.

Building for Windows ARM with Xojo

The good news is that with Xojo you are already prepared for this. To build your existing Xojo desktop project for Windows ARM, you just need to change one property in the Windows Build Settings and click Build. There is no step 3.

Xojo can also build Windows apps for x86-64 and x86-32, which pretty much covers all your bases. Not to mention that it can build macOS apps, Linux apps, web apps, iOS apps and Android apps.

And if you already have an Apple Silicon Mac then you don’t even need to purchase a Windows ARM computer. You can run Windows ARM as a virtual machine on a Mac using Parallels or VMware Fusion. You’ll still need to get your own license for Windows 11, however.

Although you can make your own Windows ARM apps with Xojo today, there are a couple temporary limitations to keep in mind. The first one is that XojoScript is not yet available. The other is that Xojo itself is not yet a native Windows ARM app. Both of these are because the Xojo compiler itself is not yet native on Windows ARM. That will change, but for now Xojo itself runs perfectly fine using the Prism x86-64 emulation layer in Windows. In addition you can use the Remote Debugger to test your apps on Windows ARM from another computer.

Will Windows ARM replace Intel like it did for Macs? It seems hard to believe, but the wind seems to be blowing in that direction. To make sure you’re prepared, download Xojo for free today and start creating your own ARM apps!

Paul learned to program in BASIC at age 13 and has programmed in more languages than he remembers, with Xojo being an obvious favorite. When not working on Xojo, you can find him talking about retrocomputing at Goto 10 and on Mastodon @lefebvre@hachyderm.io.

For those of you that don’t consider reading through over 220 items as fun as I do, here are a few things I thought I would highlight, in no particular order.

• Desktop projects now save icon resources as compressed PNGs. This can greatly reduce binary/xml project file size and also reduce the .xojoresources file size in text projects. In the case of the Eddie’s Electronics sample project, the binary project dropped from 11MB to 780K, the XML project from 22MB to 1.1MB and the .xojoresources file from 11MB to 388K.

• Need to iterate through a String’s characters in a completely unicode-friendly way (including emojis)? Rather than using the String.Characters iterator, use the new String.Codepoints iterator which returns one value for each unicode scalar.

• You can now install Xojo on Windows ARM 64-bit. Xojo itself remains an Intel x86-64 binary, but Windows ARM has a translation system built-in that will allow Xojo to run. This should allow those of you using ARM Windows in a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac to use Xojo there. If you’re interested in native Xojo support for Windows ARM, subscribe to Feedback Case 62672 so you’ll be notified of updates.

• Auto-complete continues to get smarter and faster. It can’t quite write your code for you, but now it does a better job of substituting text and offering suggestions, among other things.

• The Code Editor has more improvements, particularly in the area of code folding. Another improvement is that you can use Go To Location to jump to a specific line in the code using “#50” (for example) in addition to the previously allowed “50”.

• For use with Declares, there is now an OSHandle class that can handle either an Integer or a Ptr.

• And although we mentioned it in another blog post, I’d still like to remind people that you can again build your Mac apps from Windows and Linux. Improvements in the open-source linker project used by Xojo allowed us to bring this feature back. Of course, please continue to test your Mac apps on an actual Mac before you ship them.