[Lazarus] Alternatives to WinCE (Windows Mobile)

[Sven Barth]

On 31.08.2012 11:16, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Tommi Prami <groups.tprami at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OK, but still... as seems that Microsoft is not supporting that line of
>> Windows Mobile for very long... And possibility to support WinRT with other
>> thatn Microsoft compilers seems not to be possible anyways... (Slightly off
>> topic but an point to think of...)
>
> Why not? I thought that WinRT is just the same as normal Win32/64
> apps, but the availables APIs are different. Or am I wrong?
>

I have not yet looked into it deeply, but applications that use WinRT 
can be normal binary applications (this includes managed ones) and also 
HTML5/JavaScript based ones. The latter is not that intresting for this 
topic, so I'll concentrate on the former. Those apps then use the APIs 
provided by WinRT and only those. The operating system can then check 
whether the application behaves "good" and only uses that APIs and then 
allows to run it on "locked down" versions of Windows like the ARM 
version of Windows 8. Only the non-WinRT applications provided by 
Microsoft (Explorer, System Control, Task Manager, etc.) are allowed to 
run on Windows ARM.

So to support running LCL applications on WinRT only (like is needed on 
a locked down Windows 8 ARM) we'd need to be able to support WinRT and 
then maybe (as best solution) provide a CustomDrawn target for WinRT 
without resorting to the normal WinAPI (though I'm not really sure 
whether any WinAPI usage is not allowed - if that is really the case 
we'd need a new compiler target for WinRT).

If we'd have a "unlocked" Windows 8 ARM though we should rather easily 
be able to provide a new arm-win32 target which allows to run normal 
LCL-win32 applications on that system...

Regards,
Sven