Hi all,

cross-posting for reach (guess that only few read internals-win).

We had a feature request the other day to ship PHP builds for Windows on
arm64[1].  It seems to me that Windows on arm64 has left its infancy,
and we may not want to fall too far behind in supporting that platform.

We already have basic support for doing PHP builds for Windows on arm64
for a few years, but there are still two major issues:

(1) The libraries on which several extensions rely are not yet available
for Windows on arm64; at least the winlib-builder[2] would need to be
improved in this regard, but of course, some libraries may not even
support Windows on arm64 yet.

(2) To my knowledge, none of the core developers has a Windows on arm64
environment available, and I presume that nobody wants to run an arm64
emulator on an x64 machine.  And since there are no public GH runners
for that platform (that might change in a couple of months, though[3]),
we cannot actually test (let alone develop) these builds.

If we ship builds with what we have now, we may get user feedback, and
might be able to fix an issue or three.  And we may even get some help
regarding (1), so (hope dies last) we might be able to ship a full
fledged PHP 8.4.0 for Windows on arm64.

Therefore I suggest to make PHP 8.4 builds for Windows on arm64
available on <https://windows.php.net/>, either on the QA releases page,
or on the snapshots page, but to clearly mark these as highly
experimental and incomplete.

Thoughts?

[1] <https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/15610>
[2] <https://github.com/winlibs/winlib-builder>
[3]
<https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/arm64-on-github-actions-powering-faster-more-efficient-build-systems/>

Christoph

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