Roadmap: native ARM64 toolchain (w64devkit-arm64, aarch64-w64-mingw32)
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Domain
- compilers, devtools, operating-systems
Research direction
Start by testing GCC 15's tentative aarch64-w64-mingw32 support and whether GDB can debug Windows ARM64 targets. Assess the ARM64 builds of GCC, GDB, and 7z SFX, including the C++ exception limitation, then examine the eventual libmemory and libchkstk work. Done means a working debugger and complete toolchain, or documented findings showing what must remain x64.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Due to Windows' built-in, transparent x86/x64 emulation — which is honestly quite impressive! — w64dk already works out-of-the-box on ARM64, if with a performance penalty. (Though busybox-w32 in emulation thinks the user is named root? This needs investigation.) GCC 15 has partial, tentative support for aarch64-w64-mingw32. So perhaps it's time to explore an ARM64 toolchain. Lacking C++ exceptions, initial attempts will likely only support C. This issue is an open invitation to try it out and report results/findings.
Will the lack of C++ exceptions interfere with the ARM64 cross-builds of GCC, GDB, and 7z SFX? These are written in C++. Can GDB even debug Windows ARM64 targets (current guess: no)? I won't consider it ready, even with just a C toolchain, without a working debugger. If these components cannot be compiled for ARM64, perhaps they remain x64 such that it's actually a C cross-toolchain hosted on x64 targeting ARM64. This would all be transparent to users.
Regardless, a complete toolchain will require eventually porting libmemory and libchkstk.
- Dominant language
- C
- Stars
- 4.8k
- Forks
- 381
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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