Support for Windows ARM such as Microsoft Surface Pro

[philltran]

We have a student with a Microsoft Surface Pro and discovered that the windows 64 bit installer of WPILib does not work on ARM based machines.

We don't expect a build to be released this season, but am putting in the feature request now for next season.

Also, do you know if a guide exists for manually installing the dependencies on ARM based Windows?

Thank you.

[Daltz333]

I believe that there are quite a bit of complications for building for ARM. @ThadHouse

[ThadHouse]

Windows on Arm only supports 32 bit x86 apps, so you'd need to use the 32 bit installer.

As for fully supporting Arm, I've been looking into getting support. Currently the installer, java and the c++ compiler all have no way of being built natively for arm. Something that can be looked into, but not sure how feasible all that will be even within a year.

[philltran]

Thank you for the updates.

[ThadHouse]

Based on how gradle works, its actually unlikely that we will be able to ship a native Arm64 build of everything WPILib provides. However, the support for 64 bit executables coming in Windows 11 should make existing 64 bit builds work. However, this will likely require Windows 11, and I suspect we will not be able to get working Windows 10 support, unless you use the 32 bit builds.

[atilling]

Does the 2022 install fully function on a windows 11 ARM install?

[ThadHouse]

Its never been tested, as none of us have a Windows 11 ARM device on the dev team. Theoretically the 64 bit installer should work, as Windows 11 now has 64 bit x86 emulation, but its never been tested.

[Starlight220]

Any update on this? Can this be closed?

[atilling]

I can state it worked for me in windows 11, but I was running windows 11 on an M1 Mac Book Prod with windows running on VMWare fusion preview edition

[ThadHouse]

I won't want to close this until we have a native arm windows version. We've done it for mac, but doing it for windows is going to be harder.