Microsoft is officially joining the Windows on Arm Project to help accelerate growth of the ecosystem. Linaro, Arm and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have been working together for the past year to advance Windows on Arm by building an ecosystem which supports native development, in response to user demand. In April 2021, the companies announced the availability of the Windows 10 on Arm bot support and binary as part of the LLVM 12.0.0 release.

LLVM is one of the main tools the open-source community uses to compile their code. At the end of September 2021, Qt 6.2 was released, with Windows on Arm hardware being available as a Technology preview. The current plan is to be able to provide full support for Windows 11 in a Qt 6.2 patch-level release. Qt is a GUI toolkit that provides cross-platform support for many open source and commercial packages across the major operating systems. Both the LLVM 12.0.0 release and the Qt 6.2 release are enabling developers to recompile applications faster as there is now native Windows on Arm support.

Having started with LLVM and Qt, the Windows on Arm project is now planning to focus its attention on Python, looking at the ecosystem of support packages and libraries. Some of the work already underway has resulted in acceptance upstream and Windows on Arm will be part of the next release. To find out more about the project, go to the Windows on Arm project page.

“We are pleased to welcome Microsoft to the Windows on Arm project in collaboration with Arm and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., said Andrea Gallo, VP of Business Development. “We will continue to address gaps in the upstream CI for packages to run natively on Windows on Arm and target optimal performance with reduced power consumption.”