[llvm-dev] Showcase of the Windows/ARM64/MinGW target

[Martin Storsjö via llvm-dev]

Hi,

At the Build conference recently, Microsoft had a session about Windows on 
ARM(64), [1]. As case example of a large, nontrivial app rebuilt for this 
arch, they demonstrated VLC.

The presentation claimed that this was built with MSVC, with zero changes 
to the source.

This actually isn't true; the app that was demonstrated was actually built 
with Clang and LLD with mingw-w64 as SDK (and there had been quite a few 
minor fixes throughout the codebase to make it all build both with 
clang/libc++ for windows, and for windows on non x86 targets).

Despite the pretty drastic miscommunication, I think it was nice to have 
at least the output from these tools demonstrated. (The presenter was 
reminded about how it actually was built after the presentation; 
apparently this information had been lost somewhere along the chain.)

And as a fun fact, it can be mentioned that a large amout of the 
windows/arm64 support in LLVM/LLD was developed before I even had access 
to this OS for testing, or even MSVC for reference - most of it was 
developed and tested just with wine (bootstrapped from a handful of 
reference windows/arm64 binaries).

Thanks to everybody who have helped make this happen!

// Martin

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdYIaUeZnqc