Setting up a developer machine on Snapdragon
Editors, runtimes and containers that run native on ARM, plus the few gaps to plan around.
Updated Nov 5, 2026 · 4 min readEditors and IDEs
Visual Studio, VS Code and the JetBrains IDEs all ship native ARM64 builds. Get the ARM64 installer directly, because some download pages default to x64.
Runtimes
Python, Node.js, .NET, Go, Rust and the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK all publish ARM64 Windows builds. Remove any x64 versions first, so tools don't pick the emulated runtime from your PATH.
Containers and Linux
Docker Desktop has a native ARM64 build. WSL runs ARM64 Linux distributions natively. x64-only container images still run, but they're emulated and much slower, so use multi-arch or arm64 images where you can.
Gaps to plan around
- Android Studio isn't supported on Windows on ARM.
- Sublime Text only ships an x64 build for Windows, so it runs under emulation.
- Old x64 debuggers and profilers can't attach to native processes. Use ARM64-aware tools.