Popular media player VLC has now become one of the first to join the ranks of Windows apps with native ARM64 support (via Engadget; MSPU). The move comes not long after Microsoft launched support for building ARM64 Windows apps in the latest Visual Studio preview, announced at its Build 2018 developer conference.
The first Windows 10 on ARM devices launched earlier this year, and each is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 platform. Windows 10 on ARM is already capable of running legacy Windows apps via x86 emulation. However, having to run apps through an emulation layer comes at a slight performance cost. Offering the option for developers to recompile their apps to run natively on ARM64 chips should mean that apps are able to squeeze out every last bit of performance enabled by the hardware.
As Microsoft pointed out at Build, native ARM64 support is still in an early preview, so there are some caveats here. While developers can build ARM64 apps in Visual Studio, official support is still lacking. Developers aren't able to submit ARM64 packages to the Microsoft Store just yet, but they can post preview versions of their Win32 apps rebuilt for ARM64 on their websites.
If you own a Windows 10 on ARM PC, such as the HP Envy x2, you can download the ARM64 VLC package from VLC now to get started.
