Support for Native Windows on Arm version of MiKTeX

[tsomanna]

Hi all,

I’m part of the Windows Application Ecosystem and Open-Source Development team at Qualcomm. We’re currently working to expand support for applications on Windows on Snapdragon (WoS) platforms by providing native ARM64 support.

We noticed that MiKTeX doesn’t yet have an official native Windows ARM64 build, and running the x64 version under emulation on Windows ARM64 is noticeably slower than running it natively on x64.

To explore this, I’ve built a native Windows ARM64 version of MiKTeX using MSVC and CMake.

In my initial testing with a few representative use cases, the ARM64 build appears functionally on par with the x64 version, and performance is significantly better than running the x64 build under emulation on the same ARM64 machine.

If you’re okay with this general approach (Windows ARM64 + MSVC/CMake ), please let me know how you’d like to take this forward so we can move toward a PR for adding Windows ARM64 support. I’m happy to share more details about the changes and the dependency setup as needed.

Looking forward to your guidance on the next steps.
Tania