Any plans for a native Windows 10 ARM64 build?

[nr0gara]

requesting native arm64 version too. its quite nice to work on latest apple silicon macs in paallels/fusion. even without any plugins, tc is really total commander to have bunch of functions out of a box. personally me thinking that the future belongs to arm of energy efficient.

notepad++, 7zip, openvpn, farmanager - have arm64 version, Christian, please consider the possibility to make arm64 version of tc

[ghisler(Author)]

I repeat that a lot of the functionality comes from plugins. These are DLLs and only work when they use the same processor and bitness (32-bit or 64-bit) as the calling program. So all the plugins would also have to be compiled for ARM64. When you check how many plugins still aren't available as a 64-bit version after so many years, I would say that it's rather improbable to get a good amount of plugins ported over to ARM64.

[MaxX]

Any plans for it?
There are enough much laptops with Win 11 ARM, and it seems to see more of them in future...

[petermad]

See: https://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=54829&start=15

[white]

Moderator message from: white » 2024-04-08, 23:22 UTC

Merged topic into this topic
» Total Commander for Windows 11 ARM ?

[norfie²]

IMHO the question of a native Windows on ARM build of Total Commander is more a question of the effort required to create one than the availability of any plugins. As with the switch from 32 to 64 bit, both Intel-x64 and ARM versions will coexist and you will be running both versions in parallel on Windows on ARM for a relatively long time.

[ghisler(Author)]

In principle Lazarus/Free Pascal supports the ARM target, but I haven't tested yet whether it would build and work. But since it's not possible to use X86_64 DLLs from ARM code, it would be impossible to use any plugins.

[norfie²]

Without an ARM version of Total Commander, there will not be a single plugin for the non-existing ARM version of Total Commander.

The switch from 32-bit to 64-bit has shown that a native file manager has advantages over a file manager that runs in a virtualization. If you are aware of the differences, you will use the version that suits you best - native without any plugin or virtualized with many plugins.

[umbra]

In principle Lazarus/Free Pascal supports the ARM target, but I haven't tested yet whether it would build and work. But since it's not possible to use X86_64 DLLs from ARM code, it would be impossible to use any plugins.

Miscrosoft provides ARM64EC ABI for that reason: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220830-00/?p=107069
So it could be done. Whether it would be worth it, that's another question.

[ghisler(Author)]

Unfortunately Free Pascal (fpc) does not support it:
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,55207.msg410329.html#msg410329

[norfie²]

FPC 3.3.1 already supports aarch64-win64, however due to some bugs in the code generator that have yet to be investigated it can't cycle itself and thus is not really usable for developing larger applications (which includes Lazarus).

Source

Long story short: The development of TCmd for Windows on ARM can start at the earliest when Windows is also listed here under the section “ARM64 (aarch64)” or when this webpage https://www.freepascal.org/down/aarch64/win64.html exists.

[ghisler(Author)]

That's not sufficient, it would also have to support ARM64EC to be able to load X86-64 plugins.