Could I request for the terminal to support the arm64ec mode?

[KawasakiNinjaH2R]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

I hope that the terminal can support the arm64ec mode and be able to compile successfully on arm64ec. Thanks in advance!

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

[lhecker]

Your feature request doesn't describe why would you like to have arm64ec support. Could you explain why you'd like to have it?

[KawasakiNinjaH2R]

HIi @lhecker ,

I am an VC++ vendor team member responsible for testing the MSVC compiler's functionality. I would like to test whether the terminal can be successfully compiled using MSVC in arm64ec mode. Previously, we enabled arm64ec mode for the terminal by applying a patch. However, every time we update the terminal's commit, we need to regenerate a new patch, which is a significant amount of work. Therefore, I would like to request if it's possible for you to add support for arm64ec mode in the terminal, Thanks in advance!

[driver1998]

Why would VC++ need a ARM64EC terminal though? Visual Studio is ARM64 native these days and it runs on ARM64 .NET Framework which does not support ARM64EC binaries.

[KawasakiNinjaH2R]

I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your response.

[DHowett]

@KawasakiNinjaH2R Oh, you haven't inconvenienced anyone! We are not currently offering ARM64EC build configurations for two reasons:

1. No part of Windows Terminal is intended for use in a plugin model, and no part of Windows Terminal or conhost are intended to be loaded as a DLL into another process. The architecture mismatch doesn't matter in this case, as all of the constituent binaries will be either x64 or arm64, with no mixed-architecture workloads.
2. We have not yet productized the parts of the project that are intended for loading or deployment into another project.

However, if this is for MSVC and compiler testing purposes I would love to see your patch for arm64ec. If it is not too large, we can evaluate adding a build option. 😄

[KawasakiNinjaH2R]

@DHowett,

Thank you very much for your patience in explaining. We do primarily use it for testing purposes, and indeed our patch files tend to be quite large. Typically, we manually modify and regenerate new patch files. Here is a copy of our patch file. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations to assist us?

terminal_ARM64EC.patch

[zadjii-msft]

One big immediate note from just skimming: You might want to just edit https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/src/common.build.pre.props. That file is loaded into basically all our projects, so you don't need a big 'ol

diff --git a/src/cascadia/ElevateShim/elevate-shim.vcxproj b/src/cascadia/ElevateShim/elevate-shim.vcxproj
index ba12ddf62..627fd9ae4 100644
--- a/src/cascadia/ElevateShim/elevate-shim.vcxproj
+++ b/src/cascadia/ElevateShim/elevate-shim.vcxproj
@@ -1,5 +1,71 @@
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="15.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
+  <ItemGroup Label="ProjectConfigurations">
+    <ProjectConfiguration Include="AuditMode|ARM64EC">
+      <Configuration>AuditMode</Configuration>
+      <Platform>ARM64EC</Platform>
+    </ProjectConfiguration>
+    <ProjectConfiguration Include="AuditMode|Win32">
+      <Configuration>AuditMode</Configuration>
+      <Platform>Win32</Platform>
+    </ProjectConfiguration>
+    <ProjectConfiguration Include="Debug|ARM64EC">
+      <Configuration>Debug</Configuration>
+ ...

for every project.