Five years before Apple Silicon, Windows already ran on ARM64 CPUs - with Visual Studio to match. Delphi's fallen a decade behind!
InstallAware takes leadership, and sponsors the port:
www.installaware.com/lazarus-arm64.msi
The open source Free Pascal compiler, together with the Lazarus IDE (Delphi's clone) now both run beautifully on ARM64!
Why do we care when Windows 10/11 on ARM64 already has near-excellent emulation of both x86 and x64 apps? Many scenarios, such as shell extensions, require pure ARM64 support - and cannot be emulated. InstallAware made a case study out of just a scenario - DiskZIP, its patented (US 10,911,065) transparent disk (and file) compressor:
www.installaware.com/blog/?p=986
Also note that ARM64EC is an application binary interface for x64 interop only. ARM64EC is incompatible with ARM64. You can't load ARM64EC DLLs from ARM64 EXEs, or load ARM64 DLLs from ARM64EC EXEs - defeating the purpose.
InstallAware's been increasingly investing in open source. It published the sources of InstallAware 2026 (Multi Platform), which itself built using Lazarus. It's now being named the Inno Setup/NSIS for Linux, Mac, and Windows combined:
www.github.com/installaware/iamp
