Status of Cygwin on Windows/ARM64?

[Arthur Norman]

I have been VERY happily pleased about how well Cygwin runs using
Prism on Windows/ARM64. I can build and test my x86_64 code there using it 
despite the underlying CPU being an ARM. My genuine Windows/x86_64 machine 
is not that new these days. Using a stack Macbook-m1/UTM/Windows11-ARM64 
runs the proggrams in build using cygwin on that Windows as x86_64 code via 
Prism and is quite close in speed to that which I observe on my "real" 
Windows computer.

If there was both an ARM64-targeting cross compiler and a bunch of 
libraries I would be using it to provide the bash shell, autoconf etc that 
I want to use to build native ARM applications there. Well I can
invoke and ARM64-targeting clang from cygwin there or Microsoft's 
compiler and I am fully expecting that "vcpkg" will let me get a very 
large proportion of the rest that I require in place, but I have not 
played that game yet.

So in the sense "can it provide part of a development environment on a 
fast Windows-on-ARM machine" it is not too bad, but things may take a bit 
of fudging and it will depend on exactly what you want to do.

For building and running Linux-style software on Windows/ARM64 you can of 
course fire up WSL there which gives you a genuine Linux world, but at 
present using that to cross-build for native Windows/ARM64 is something I 
have not found good pointers about.

Arthur

On Sat, 7 Sep 2024, Mark Liam Brown via Cygwin wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> What is the current status of Cygwin on Windows/ARM64? Does it work?
>
> Mark