[thedjinn]

I wonder if it's possible to use some kind of translator, like Apple did with Rosetta to run PowerPC code on x86. This is of course not interesting for the Surface but it might be a nice solution for a desktop transition to ARM.

[zanny]

Its not really the actual limit. Nobody is writing architecture-specific code anymore. Being able to binary translate x86 won't change the fact that the program you are trying to run is trying to invoke a thousand libraries for a proprietary OS that will never open up or otherwise become portable, that is also compiled against a system call interface specific to only that proprietary non-standard OS.

If Windows on ARM allowed generic binaries, almost everything in the Windows ecosystem would be on ARM. For Windows.

[latch]

Like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe ?