Delphi apps on ARM CPU?

[dummzeuch 1621]

2 hours ago, Joseph MItzen said:

When 100% of Delphi developers were Windows users who just wanted a button they could push to cross-compile their code to Linux, they gave us a new framework and attempted to get the IDE itself to run on Linux. Linux desktop was barely even a thing then.

I for one loved Kylix, I even bought it twice - once through my employer (I partly owned the company at the time) and another one for personal use. That was a brief period when I hoped that Linux would actually take off on the desktop. Unfortunately, that never happened. Even now, with the end of support for Windows 10 looming and millions of perfectly usable computers in danger of being turned into electronic waste, Linux on the desktop is not gaining any visible market share.

Edited April 10 by dummzeuch

[Der schöne Günther 335]

12 hours ago, Brandon Staggs said:

On the flip side, however, since ARM-based Windows machines run x64 apps just fine, there is no real pressure on Embarcadero to rush offering a compiler. 

Thank you for your first hand insights into using a Windows ARM machine with Delphi.

I stopped following the progress on WindowsOnARM a few years ago, so I am not up to date.

 

Would you be willing to tell more about your daily usage, maybe in a separate thread? I'd be absolutely interested in typical day to day usage, battery runtimes, standby/wakeup times and where it could start to get tricky (old printer drivers, shell extensions, obscure software,...).

[Sherlock 681]

2 hours ago, Der schöne Günther said:

Would you be willing to tell more about your daily usage, maybe in a separate thread? I'd be absolutely interested in typical day to day usage, battery runtimes, standby/wakeup times and where it could start to get tricky (old printer drivers, shell extensions, obscure software,...).

I think it would be fair to say that Windows on ARM is not for legacy environments. It is intended for new mainstream devices. So no immediate support for decades old printers and other old hardware should be expected. However(!) as soon as it gets more traction I expect that to change.

[Brandon Staggs 377]

7 hours ago, dummzeuch said:

Anybody remember OS/2? They had great support for running DOS and Windows 16 bit programs. So nobody bothered to write any native OS/2 programs. Guess what happened when Windows went 32 bits? (OK, that was not the only reason for OS/2's demise, but a big part of it.)

Yes, I remember that. However, we are already well-past that point for two reasons: 

 

1. Windows on ARM is not a competing operating system or any more than Windows x64 with WOW was competing with x86. 

 

2. There is already massive support for ARM64 Windows in the form of tons and tons of native binaries already available. Nobody has to wait for this to eventually happen. It is happening now. Actually, it happened at the end of last year.

[Brandon Staggs 377]

5 hours ago, Der schöne Günther said:

Would you be willing to tell more about your daily usage, maybe in a separate thread? I'd be absolutely interested in typical day to day usage, battery runtimes, standby/wakeup times and where it could start to get tricky (old printer drivers, shell extensions, obscure software,...).

No, I don't see the point -- there are already so many people who actually do hardware comparisons for a living writing about it. Aside from commenting here in the context of a Delphi developer, I don't have time to write my experience in detail. I will just add this:

 

I bought a Snapdragon Windows PC when I saw that users of my software were installing it on Snapdragon Windows PCs, but that the 32-bit version of my software was appearing instead of the 64-bit. I quickly realized this was due to how the Inno Setup script was written, which assumed that if x64 was not available that the system needed the 32-bit x86 binaries installed. Inno added support for some additional scripting functions to better handle this and I wanted to test my software on Snapdragon so I bought one and fixed the install script. That works perfectly. And now any time I need to grab a portable PC I take the Snapdragon one because its the lightest Windows PC I have and the one with the best battery life. I've had no issues doing what I need to do on it. This is not some cheesy WinRT netbook from 12 years ago that can only open a web browser and play Candy Crush and run Office apps. This is the Windows answer to an Apple MacBook (which I have two of also).

Edited Thursday at 02:22 PM by Brandon Staggs