ARM-powered devices continue to gain significant traction across a number of platforms. Last year marked a pivotal moment with Microsoft’s release of new Surface products as well as laptops from multiple vendors featuring Snapdragon X CPUs. This commitment is further reinforced by Qualcomm’s recent announcement of the Snapdragon X2 Elite, further enabling developer workflows on native devices.

Conan has been platform-agnostic since its inception, already enabling teams to target various operating systems and CPU architectures using the same recipes and commands (e.g., macOS Apple Silicon, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, …). Windows ARM64 is no exception.

But up until now, the conancenter remote lacked binaries for this evergrowing platform, that’s why we’re thrilled to announce improved support for Windows ARM64 in Conan Center recipes! We’ve been working hard to streamline the development experience for this platform, and the latest improvements are now rolling out.

What’s New and Improved?

Native Installer and Self-Contained Executable: While Conan is typically installed by developers locally using pip, we also provide standalone installers that don’t require a Python distribution. Starting with the Conan 2.21.0 release, we are now providing a native ARM64 Windows installer as well as a self-contained executable for Conan.

Validated recipes for native development: We understand that a package manager is only as good as the packages it provides. We’ve dedicated significant effort to validating a subset of the most popular Conan Center recipes to ensure they build and run natively on Windows ARM64. This includes over 350+ recipes in Conan Center (and counting!), including the most popular ones such as Boost, OpenCV, Qt, ffmpeg, Protocol buffers, gRPC, and many more!

Improved fallbacks for build tools that don’t yet support ARM64: Some recipes require build tools that currently only run with x86_64 emulation, like Autotools on msys2 and strawberry perl. We have improved the recipes so that compatible binaries are transparently fetched from Conan Center without manual tweaks.

Availability of Windows ARM64 binaries in Conan Center: To further simplify your development workflow, Conan Center CI will now actively build and publish Windows ARM64 binaries for already validated recipes. This means that for an ever growing list of libraries, you won’t need to build from source on your ARM64 machine if your profile matches the available binaries, saving you time and resources. This is an ongoing process and we aim to publish Windows ARM64 binaries for every recipe that supports it. You can check if binaries are available in the Conan Center package explorer, example: https://conan.io/center/recipes/fmt

Your Feedback Fuels Our Progress!

This is an ongoing effort, and your feedback is invaluable. As you begin to develop on Windows ARM64 with Conan, we strongly encourage you to share your experiences, report any issues, and suggest additional recipes you’d like to see natively supported. Your contributions help us prioritize and expand our ARM64 coverage, ensuring Conan Center remains a powerful resource for all developers.

Getting started with Conan for native ARM64 Windows Development

To get started with native Windows ARM64 development, you’ll need the right tools. Here’s a quick guide to the essential components:

Conan

Download the latest installer (does NOT require a separate Python installation) and follow the instructions in the installation wizard.

CMake

Now you will need CMake, which you can download from the official website. Don’t forget to add it to the system PATH.

The current release at time of writing is 4.1.1 (download installer).

Visual Studio

  • Install Visual Studio 2022 (Version 17.4 or later): This is the first version of Visual Studio that offers native ARM64 support. You can download it from the official Visual Studio website. Please ensure you are using the correct license.
  • Select the “Desktop development with C++” Workload: During the Visual Studio installation process, ensure you select this workload.
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That’s it! Now let’s get this to work. In a terminal window, first run the following command:

> conan profile detect

The result should be:

Detected profile:
[settings]
arch=armv8
build_type=Release
compiler=msvc
compiler.cppstd=17
compiler.runtime=dynamic
compiler.version=194
os=Windows

⚠️ Ensure the detected architecture is arch=armv8. If you get x86_64, you may be running a non-native installation of Python or Conan. This will still work, but you will need to modify the generated profile to reflect the arm=armv8 architecture.

Build a sample project

We can now use Conan as we are already used to natively on any platform. For example one of the toy projects in the examples repo:

> git clone https://github.com/conan-io/examples2.git
> cd examples2/examples/libraries/raylib/introduction
> conan install . -s compiler.cppstd=17
> cmake --preset conan-default
> cmake --build --preset conan-release
.\build\Release\runner_game.exe
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Dependencies will be downloaded from Conan Center and the app will build and run natively on Windows ARM64.

Happy coding!