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posted by janrinok on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the ARMed-and-ready dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

Although ARM-based PCs are now available, apps that utilize native 64-bit architectures on Microsoft's Windows 10 on ARM have been relegated to legacy support for 32-bit apps. Microsoft introduced the proper frameworks for 64-bit apps at its recent BUILD conference, allowing developers to port their apps and begin native app integration. After a small wait, apps are starting to appear; VLC -- the swiss army knife of multimedia players -- is one of the first to launch a dedicated ARM64 app.

Unlike traditional Intel and AMD processors, ARM's architecture has largely been synonymous with mobile devices and tablets, which are often powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors. Microsoft's more recent developments have paved the way for proper ARM architecture within PCs, and promise a whole host of benefits including better affordability, permanent online connection and improved battery preservation.

With a popular free app like VLC making the first move, it's highly probable that other app developers will be encouraged to follow in its footsteps. You can download VLC as you normally would -- via the official website -- just ensure you select the ARM 64 version from the drop down menu.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/01/vlc-one-of-first-arm64-windows-apps/


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:59PM (21 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:59PM (#688098)

    That was the killer application that the windows store needed!

    I am going to go buy one right now!

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:01PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:01PM (#688099) Journal

    Hecc, someone gets one of these devices from a friend or off the back of the truck, then they add VLC to make it a home theater PC (HTPC).

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:42PM (13 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:42PM (#688109) Journal

    Couldn't be any worse than the Crash-A-Minute SUSE Linus Enterprise ARM-Version.

    Seriously, I haven't had a core dump in any version of Linux in so long, I've forgotten how to deal with them. Then SLES-ARM comes along (supposidly their Flagship payware product recompiled for ARM) and you seriously can't expect it to survive two days.

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    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:10PM (12 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:10PM (#688114)

      You seen, programmers like to think that they've written something relatively high-level, but they haven't. In the case of C/C++, they've invariably written code that invokes "undefined behavior", which behaves a certain way on x86+GCC, but behaves another way on ARM+LLVM, or whatevs.

      The situation isn't helped by the fact that ARM did what was expedient according to the MBAs: Creates SoCs as a conglomeration of proprietary parts, which necessitate proprietary blobs whose authors don't give a flying fuck about making something correctly, because they'll help paying OEMs work around any bugs.

      The result for the ARM ecosystem is crappy software built on top of crappy binary blobs built on top of crappy hardware.

      It's crap all the way down.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:28PM (11 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:28PM (#688133)

        This is not too far off. I have coded for lots of different CPU archs. x86 is by far the most forgiving. ARM is *not*. If you use something wrong on the wrong frame/boundary/un-owned, it eats itself PDQ. Then add to that most compilers are not exactly great under ARM. They are wildly better than when I last used those platforms. But I always would port something to ARM to find all of the little squirrely bits in a bit of C/C++ code. Pretty much every time it would find something I did wrong. Then layered on top of these platforms is a set of documentation that is to put it mildly, poor. Then as you port between these different CRT stacks they all have slightly different ways of doing things. Even for something simple like printf.

        • (Score: 2, Disagree) by frojack on Monday June 04 2018, @12:02AM (5 children)

          by frojack (1554) on Monday June 04 2018, @12:02AM (#688149) Journal

          Once again, you've mistaken your hammer for the proper tool, because it was the only tool in your toolbox.

          https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 [acm.org]

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @12:06AM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @12:06AM (#688153)

            Uh not sure what your point is? C can be unsafe? Sure. However, *when* I did this sort of thing the entire stack/memory/nvram was usually around 64k. You are not going to run much of an interpreted lang in that can do real time sort of things. I have used SoC python stacks and BASIC and others. They suck in perf if you have enough memory left over your program and data. But good luck with your use case!

            • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @11:02AM (1 child)

              Lua was designed for these restricted environments.I'm not sure how it's bloated over the years, but at least initially it was supposed to be uper-lightweight to permit use in the embedded world.
              --
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              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @10:24PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @10:24PM (#688616)

                It also has crap perf. It does not fit my use model. Do you think Lua fits in a few k with room leftover to do other things?

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @10:49AM (1 child)

            God that article's terrible, much of it is so bad it's "not even wrong".

            e.g. "C code provides a mostly serial abstract machine (until C11, an entirely serial machine if nonstandard vendor extensions were excluded)."

            Complete and utter garbage. See all the endless discussions about sequence points over the decades for proof that much of what's expressed in the language does not need to occur in any particular order, and therefore implicitly, may happen in parallel if the architecture supports that.

            e.g. "processors wishing to keep their execution units busy running C code rely on ILP (instruction-level parallelism). They inspect adjacent operations and issue independent ones in parallel."

            Roughly translated as "I've never heard of VLIW and static scheduling". Or "I've never heard of HPPA, Itanium, and various DSPs, and definitely haven't encountered The Mill architecture, despite it having the theoretical highest ILP of any architecture ever designed". He should get out more.
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @04:22PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @04:22PM (#688423)

              The intersection is expressed with "and"; the union is expressed with "or".

              • "I've never heard of VLIW or static scheduling"

              • "I've never heard of HPPA, Itanium, or various DSPs, and…"

        • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday June 04 2018, @06:26AM (4 children)

          by Subsentient (1111) on Monday June 04 2018, @06:26AM (#688248) Homepage Journal

          See, this kind of thing is exactly why I try to adhere to well-defined behavior as defined in the language standard documents.
          Otherwise, you'll see this constantly. I remember a bug in xfce4-taskmanager on 32-bit PowerPC that I submitted a patch for, and it was literally someone relying on undefined behavior. I see it too much.

          It's alright, I guess, to use extensions that are supported in both of the big two FOSS compilers (gcc and clang), but don't rely on undefined behavior otherwise!

          --
          "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @10:57AM (3 children)

            You mustn't think that just because it's in the standard it's "right". Some of the things in the standard were there to make life easier for compiler writers, which is a terrible reason to under-specify the language.

            I know, as a mathematician, what happens when I right shift an unsigned value by a shift as large or larger than the value's width - it becomes 0. Not in C, though, as some architectures interpret >>n as >>(n%width) by default, and forcing the compiler writer to know what the architecture would do and add additional code if the arch doesn't do the right thing would be too much hassle.

            So people who inadvertantly write >>n without checking that n is in range are the victims of an inhumane language. Some indeed might rely on the value becoming 0 at over-large shifts. Yes, they're wrong, but they're justified if they then want to complain about the language being braindead. No idea if that was the UB you encountered, but IME it's a very common one.
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:47PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:47PM (#688463)

              You mustn't think that just because it's in the standard it's "right"...
              ...forcing the compiler writer to know what the architecture would do...

              If the above is any indication of the state of SW development or the prowess of SW developers, then I'm not surprised that "most software is total shite".

              If something is said to be undefined in the standard it is probably (I'm guessing here) going to be undefined in some or all implementations. It is undefined. I don't see how programmers can feel victimized if they fail to account for this.

              Compiler writers pretty well must know the architecture in order to write an effective compiler for the architecture. I'm not sure how they could any other way.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @10:24PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @10:24PM (#688615)

                The compiler won't check for overflow; that is left to the programmer.

                However, because most software is written for x86, most programmers think that an overflowing right-shift is no problem, and that it will just produce the value "0". But, that's not actually what the C code means; the C code just means "issue a right-shift by the given number of bits". Hence, when said software is ported from x86 to some other architectuer, a subtle bug could creep in: The new arch doesn't allow overflowing a right-shift, or it shifts in crap instead of zeros, or who knows what!

                Put another way: The standard is written so as to shift the knowledge of the underlying architecture from the writer of a compiler to the writer of C code. Well, that's what the OP says, anyway; I'm not sure how true that is in this case.

            • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:36AM

              by Subsentient (1111) on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:36AM (#688719) Homepage Journal

              You miss the point entirely. It's not about whether it was a good idea to add such and such to the language, or leave such and such as undefined behavior, it's about preventing architecture specific bugs in your code from not following the language standard.

              If the standard says that whatever is well-defined behavior, listen to it. If it says it's undefined or unspecified behavior, listen to it.

              --
              "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:36PM (5 children)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:36PM (#688121) Homepage Journal

    I think we'll see more and more Windows Apps -- for killing, for many things. Because of me. Because I gave Microsoft the biggest Tax Cut they've ever seen in their entire life. And now they're buying the Github website. Otherwise known as App Headquarters of the World. Enjoy!!!!

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:20PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:20PM (#688131)

      I am enjoying my 300 more a month. My sister and brother in law are liking their 600 more a month. So thank you Mr. Trump. We needed the money to pay for obamacare!

      • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:55PM (3 children)

        by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday June 03 2018, @11:55PM (#688143) Homepage Journal

        Thank you for your support!

        Unfortunately we didn't do the full repeal & replace of Obamacare. But I repealed the PENALTY. Obama tried to force young & healthy folks to buy insurance. With a penalty on their income tax if they didn't. And it was very unfair. No more. If you're young, you're healthy, cancel that Obamacare and save big money!!!

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @12:02AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @12:02AM (#688151)

          Sorry need to carry it. Do not want to be bankrupted if I get something.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @01:50AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @01:50AM (#688181)

            ...or if something gets you (like being run over by a bus).

            I had no health insurance in 1984 and landed in the emergency room after a minor motorcycle accident. The overnight stay for observation after concussion cost well under $1000 and the insurance company for the at-fault car driver paid it asap. That's not the case anymore!!

            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday June 04 2018, @07:50AM

              by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 04 2018, @07:50AM (#688273)

              > ...or if something gets you (like being run over by a bus).

              This is the old-fashioned view of insurance - lots of people pay a bit to cover things that will cost a lot, but probably won't ever happen.

              The millenial view of insurance seems to be "why pay for something that probably won't ever happen" - and when it does you can always cover the bill by crowdfunding where lots of other millenials give you money because you were so unlucky that something that probably won't ever happen did happen and happened when you were stupid enough to have no insurance. Actually the more you look at it the more it looks like a kind-of reverse insurance model...