Portable

From CDOT Wiki
Revision as of 12:39, 16 January 2014 by Chris Tyler (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

A portable program is one which may be used on multiple architectures or operating systems.

Related terms:

  • Port - to modify a program to work on a particular architecture.
  • Portable - a program which can be used on multiple architectures, typically by compiling/building for a specific target architecture. Note that portable does not necessarily mean able to be ported -- it is often used to mean code which does not need to be ported, because it is architecture-neutral (i.e., contains no assembler, word size assumptions, or other architecture-specific code, and can be compiled (or interpreted) from a high-level language on a wide range of architecture types).
  • Architecture-specific - code which is usable only on one or more specific architectures.
  • Cross-platform - Code which will execute either on multiple architectures or on multiple operating systems.