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OpenJDK lands on Windows 10 for Arm: Not 100% there yet but enough to start tinkering

Port will handle SPEC's SERT and Java suites, with more features soon

While Apple's foray into the Arm world snagged much of the limelight this week, Microsoft quietly announced that the first phase of its port of OpenJDK for Windows 10 on Arm was complete.

Though the Redmond gang is being all very brave about it, Windows 10 on Arm has not really set the world alight despite Microsoft emitting its own take in the form of the Surface Pro X. Heck, even the company's own Chromium-based browser, Edge, dragged its feet when it came to putting in an appearance on Arm.

Arm-based servers, however, have attracted the attention of the Azure crowd, and for those running a Windows OS, a port of OpenJDK would make life easier.

The port itself, which is currently being upstreamed to the OpenJDK project, is not 100 per cent feature complete, according to Microsoft. It will, however, handle the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's (SPEC) SERT as well all of the SPEC Java suites. Developers with the correct hardware and sufficient courage required to run the freshly released Insider edition of the newly Arm64-happy Visual Studio Code can get cracking with the new toys from now.

Those worried that Microsoft might be a little cloud obsessed these days need fear not. According to Bruno Borges, principal program manager in Microsoft's Java Engineering Group: "While optimizing Java for Azure remains one of our core goals, it is crucial to share that we are involved in other initiatives to make the Java platform even better on areas besides the Cloud."

That said, the move comes less than a year after Microsoft picked up jClarity with a view to boosting the performance of Java workloads on Azure. Back then, the company noted that more than half of compute workloads in Azure ran on Linux before reiterating its born-again love of open source "and that certainly includes Java".

It all seems a long time ago since J++ and J# were all the rage at Redmond. ®

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