CoreCollective Collaboration Spotlight: Windows on Arm Working Group
Windows on Arm is gaining momentum, bringing powerful computing and long battery life to a growing range of devices and users. As the ecosystem grows, so does the opportunity to bring more applications and open source dependencies to Arm natively—unlocking greater performance and a better experience across the Windows on Arm platform.
Achieving fully native Arm support means ensuring the shared open source applications, tools and libraries that we all depend on are enabled for Windows on Arm in the upstream projects.
The Windows on Arm Working Group is where the Windows software ecosystem comes together to advance Arm support. Here’s a look at the work underway and opportunities to get involved.
Building a Native Windows on Arm Ecosystem
Building a complete, self-sustaining Windows on Arm ecosystem requires cross-industry alignment. Porting, optimizing, and maintaining the vast landscape of open source dependencies takes coordinated effort across a diverse set of stakeholders.
The CoreCollective Windows on Arm (WoA) Working Group brings together hardware vendors, OS teams, open source maintainers, software distributors, and application creators around shared enablement goals. Our vision is a growing, self-sustaining Arm open source ecosystem for Windows, with most of the software developers and users relying on running natively on Arm.
To help achieve that vision, the working group:
- Propose, align, and prioritize existing open source collaborative efforts.
- Identifies new collaboration opportunities across the Windows on Arm software stack.
Current member companies actively driving this initiative are Arm, CIX, Linaro, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
Areas of Active Collaboration
1. Python Package Support
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What: Working towards Windows ARM64 wheels for the top 1000 (and more) most-downloaded Python packages on PyPi. We are over 95% of the way there!
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Why it matters: Python underpins modern data science, scripting, and machine learning workflows. Wheel availability eliminates friction for developers, so that they don’t have to build the package from source.
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Why open collaboration wins: Coordinating across CoreCollective WoA working group member companies has enabled division of labour, prevented duplication of efforts, and streamlined upstreaming through peer review and PR support, while leveraging combined networks to unblock contributions with key maintainers.
2. Toolchains & Compilers (LLVM & GCC)
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What: Upstream enhancement of LLVM and GCC for Windows on Arm targets. Initiatives include MSVC intrinsics in Clang and ARM64 EC support.
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Why it matters: Robust toolchains enable upstream projects to leverage native ARM64 optimizations directly without fragmentation.
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Why open collaboration wins: Coordinating compiler developments across hardware vendors, OS teams, and maintainers prevents isolated workarounds, accelerates upstream patch reviews, and ensures all downstream projects benefit automatically from shared performance gains and toolchain fixes.
3. Developer Tooling & Ecosystem Visibility
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What: Building and cross-promoting the Windows on Arm Software Ecosystem Dashboard, Arm AppReady developer guides, and development/porting tools like a VS Code extension with GitHub Copilot chat integration.
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Why it matters: Engineers need clear visibility into package/app readiness and practical tooling to assist in migrating x64 codebases to Arm64.
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Why open collaboration wins: Open collaboration helps spread information about resources more widely & to bring to light gaps / pain points that need to be addressed.
The Working Group In Action
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Explore current and past projects on the WoA working group webpage to see where the group is focusing its efforts.
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Follow technical discussions and working group activity through the public mailing list archive
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Track open issues and contribute to ongoing work in the CoreCollective Windows on Arm GitHub Repository
Get Involved And Shape the Ecosystem
CoreCollective is a free, open community where companies collaborate to accelerate building, testing, and deploying Arm workloads. Members can drive change by joining an existing Working Group or empowering their teams to propose new Working Groups to solve pressing industry challenges.