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I totally agree with you there, buuut, before this release VSCode on a Surface Pro X would be Electron running as a ia32 emulated app, which is not only web tec

I totally agree with you there, buuut, before this release VSCode on a Surface Pro X would be Electron running as a ia32 emulated app, which is not only web technologies but also the wrong ISA. I'd love to have sublime text, textadept, or any other real native editor running under ARM64 on Windows but so far they are not available. This VSCode is the first editor shipping ARM64 binaries, even if Electron stuff. Also it is important to notice that many developers using that machine are using the ia32 version of VSCode and this version will benefit them (and it more native to the platform).

patagurbon 6y ago
Is it not possible to compile editors like emacs or Sublime Text for ARM64? I know very little about native programming but surely GCC/Clang/Visual C++ have ARM64 compilation targets?
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  It certainly is! Not sure what the situation is on Windows but Linux distros that have ARM versions typically have nearly all the same software that you’d expect on x86 in their repos. (I’m thinking of Debian in particular here, but I suspect others are similar.)
- soapdog 6y ago
  It is a chicken and egg problem. Many languages do not yet support Windows on ARM, so you can't rely on them to build stuff for the new platform. For example there is no official release of NodeJS, Python, Ruby, Perl, on the platform. Lots of FOSS rely on gnu stuff which is usually compiled on windows using mingw/msys2/cygwin, all of which are not available for Windows on ARM. So you can't easily port stuff. You can run Visual Studio and cross-compile from ia32 to arm64 on a Surface Pro X but that is unsupported by Microsoft who wants you to have two machines, one running x64 and compiling stuff and another running arm64 and testing stuff. That is unreasonable for small independent developers. So until the development ecosystem is a bit better, porting stuff will still have a lot of friction and that is why for now, IMHO, every port needs to be cherished.

patagurbon 6y ago

Is it not possible to compile editors like emacs or Sublime Text for ARM64? I know very little about native programming but surely GCC/Clang/Visual C++ have ARM64 compilation targets?

ryukafalz 6y ago
It certainly is! Not sure what the situation is on Windows but Linux distros that have ARM versions typically have nearly all the same software that you’d expect on x86 in their repos. (I’m thinking of Debian in particular here, but I suspect others are similar.)
soapdog 6y ago
It is a chicken and egg problem. Many languages do not yet support Windows on ARM, so you can't rely on them to build stuff for the new platform. For example there is no official release of NodeJS, Python, Ruby, Perl, on the platform. Lots of FOSS rely on gnu stuff which is usually compiled on windows using mingw/msys2/cygwin, all of which are not available for Windows on ARM. So you can't easily port stuff. You can run Visual Studio and cross-compile from ia32 to arm64 on a Surface Pro X but that is unsupported by Microsoft who wants you to have two machines, one running x64 and compiling stuff and another running arm64 and testing stuff. That is unreasonable for small independent developers. So until the development ecosystem is a bit better, porting stuff will still have a lot of friction and that is why for now, IMHO, every port needs to be cherished.