Arm 64 Windows and Native

Development Platforms
1

I am trying to get the Native build to compile my project. I installed “GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain” (and “Arm GNU Toolchain arm-none-eabi” for good measure). Both this packages don’t have just a pure “gcc.exe” they have names like “arm-none-eabi-gcc.exe” and "arm-none-eabi-gcc++.exe.

What is the correct way to handle this in PlatformIO?

Jim

2

arm-none-eabi is usually for compiling for ARM (32-bit) microcontrollers, not for ARM64 Windows.

With platform = native in the platformio.ini, Windows expects the regular gcc.exe / g++.exe to be in your PATH environment variable. So if you have that, it should just work.

3

Windows for ARM does not include a built in gcc compiler though. I need one. I have it all working on M1 MacOS and I am running Windows ARM in a VM.

4

Oh, I see.

Hm this actually seems to be an open topic?

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=108678

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-aarch64-w64-mingw32

There is https://github.com/Windows-on-ARM-Experiments/mingw-woarm64-build to get a compiler running on Linux to produce Windows-on-ARM (WoA) binaries, but this says it doesn’t yet run on Windows natively.

Of course, Visual Studio has its working native Windows on ARM compiler, but I don’t think PlatformIO is capable of calling into those. It expects a GCC.

The toolchains found on https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/arm-gnu-toolchain-downloads target either the Baremetal ARM environments (aka, microcontrollers) or Linux ARM environments, but not Windows-on-ARM.

If I’m not mistaken, and maybe I am, I’m only seeing a x86_64 producing GCC now (https://winlibs.com/) that works with the native platform. Through the built-in emulation, this work normally, but not producing native code.

5

You may be able to download this Clang version:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmorg-18.1.8/clang+llvm-18.1.8-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.tar.xz

Together with having link.exe from the regular Visual Studio C++ build tools installed and in your PATH, try to compile a simple

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("Hello, world!\n");
  return 0;
}

with

clang --target=arm64-pc-windows-msvc -o hello.exe hello.c

Clang is also supported by PlatformIO.

6

Thanks, I will try to get back to this in a day or two and see if I can get it going.