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Portability

Portability refers to a program's ability to run on different operating systems without major changes. Porting a program involves any work needed to run it on a new OS, such as removing OS-specific extensions and replacing functions with those available in the new OS. While programs using standard interfaces like C require only recompiling, porting may also involve data conversion or adapting to new system procedures. The Java programming language and runtime make programs portable across any OS supporting the Java standard without porting work by running precompiled bytecode from one OS to another.

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Aashutosh Tiwari
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69 views1 page

Portability

Portability refers to a program's ability to run on different operating systems without major changes. Porting a program involves any work needed to run it on a new OS, such as removing OS-specific extensions and replacing functions with those available in the new OS. While programs using standard interfaces like C require only recompiling, porting may also involve data conversion or adapting to new system procedures. The Java programming language and runtime make programs portable across any OS supporting the Java standard without porting work by running precompiled bytecode from one OS to another.

Uploaded by

Aashutosh Tiwari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Portability is a characteristic attributed to a computer program if it can be used in

an operating systems other than the one in which it was created without requiring
major rework. Porting is the task of doing any work necessary to make the
computer program run in the new environment. In general, programs that adhere
to standard program interfaces such as the X/Open UNIX 95
standard C language interface are portable. Ideally, such a program needs only
to be compiled for the operating system to which it is being ported. However,
programmers using standard interfaces also sometimes use operating
system extensions or special capabilities that may not be present in the new
operating system. Uses of such extensions have to be removed or replaced with
comparable functions in the new operating system. In addition to language
differences, porting may also require data conversion and adaptation to new
system procedures for running an application.

Portability has usually meant some work when moving an application program to
another operating system. Recently, the Java programming language and
runtime environment has made it possible to have programs that run on any
operating system that supports the Java standard (from Sun Microsystems)
without any porting work. Java applets in the form of precompiled bytecode can
be sent from a server program in one operating system to a client program (your
Web browser) in another operating system without change.

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