Support for win32-arm64?

[stellar-aria]

Now that Windows ARM laptops have been in production for about a year and are gaining strength, are there any plans to provide native arm64 versions of packages for the platform?

Personally, I'm investigating getting a Snapdragon X laptop, and heavily rely on arm-none-eabi-gcc-xpack for embedded development, so having a native version would be really nice.

[ilg-ul]

Yeah, there are plans, but technically there are still some challenges; probably I could cross-compile some win32-arm64 binaries, but I don't have a way to test them yet, and GitHub Actions do not provide any win32-arm64 runners.

[ilg-ul]

Actually only the Linux arm64 runners. That's a step forward, since the Windows binaries are built on Linux.

But we also need the Windows arm64 runners, for the final tests.

[stellar-aria]

Windows 11 ARM64 runners are now publicly available: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-04-14-windows-arm64-hosted-runners-now-available-in-public-preview/

[ilg-ul]

Thank you, I'll consider adding support for Windows arm64 in future releases, but I cannot estimate now how long it'll take to prepare the build and test configurations.

[stellar-aria]

If there's anything I can do to help out, just let me know. I assume it would start with adding a yaml file here: https://github.com/xpack/npm-packages-helper/tree/master/templates/common/_xpack-dev-tools/.github/workflows?

[ilg-ul]

Ah, thank you, but things are more complicated than that. I need to prepare a new mingw-w64-gcc to include variants of the tools that are able to generate arm64 binaries, and possibly WineHQ variants that are able to execute the Windows arm64 binaries on Linux. Only then I can build all packages for Windows arm64. And I also have to install a Windows arm64 virtual machine on a local Linux arm64 machine, for local tests. It is a lot of work.

[ilg-ul]

The question also was asked on a specific project:

• Request: Add build target for arm64 Windows windows-build-tools-xpack#30