PuTTY wish winrt

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summary: Port PuTTY to Windows RT (aka Metro)
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.

Various people have asked us for a port of PuTTY to Windows RT so that it
could run on the "Metro" side of Windows 8 and thus on Microsoft's ARM-based
"Surface" tablets.

A WinRT port of PuTTY would be a lot of work.  The platform
independent code would probably work mostly unmodified, but you would
have to implement all the platform-specific parts of PuTTY (the
networking abstraction, user input, terminal display and settings GUI)
in terms of the WinRT API.  Not impossible, and probably easier with
PuTTY than with many other applications, but still a lot of work.

Also, all applications to work on ARM WinRT devices have to be certified
by Microsoft and have to be `sold' through the Windows App Store.
That's likely to be a lot of faff, and Microsoft would probably want
to gouge some money from us for the privilege.  (Also I wouldn't bet on
a PuTTY port passing any kind of MS certification.)

It's something we'd like to see, but there's nothing imminently
happening.

(This isn't to say that the existing PuTTY cannot run on the "desktop"
side of Windows 8 on Intel systems; as far as we know this should be
fine. A couple of people have reported that the Windows 8 "compatibility
wizard" or some such is flagging PuTTY as incompatible with Windows 8.
We don't know what this is about; the same people who've reported this
have gone on to use PuTTY regardless, without noticing any actual
problems.)

A third-party port called "Metro PuTTY" exists and can be found on our
Links page.

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2016-03-20 13:59:57 +0000)