How does porting between Linux and Windows work?

windows linux porting
Kefka picture Kefka · Apr 19, 2010 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

If a particular piece of software is made to be run on one platform and the programmer/company/whatever wants to port it to the other, what exactly is done? I mean, do they just rewrite linux or windows-specific references to the equivalent in the other? Or is an entire rewrite necessary?

Just trying to understand what makes it so cost-prohibitive that so many major vendors don't port their software to Linux (specifically thinking about Adobe)

Thanks

Answer

chris picture chris · Apr 19, 2010

this is the point of a cross-platform toolkit like qt or gtk, they provide a platform-agnostic API, which delegates to whichever platform the program is compiled for.

some companies don't use such a toolkit, and write their own (for whatever reason - could well be optimisation-related), meaning they can't just recompile their code for another os.

Related questions

Porting Winsock to Linux Sockets

I have a program that does some networking using Winsock, and one of our requirements right now is to port over our program to Linux. The only thing stopping us from doing this is Winsock. My question is: How easy …

Read More
Raw Ethernet Frames Using Winsock

I am porting a communications library from Linux to Windows. I know what my approach is for the most part. The library uses all raw ethernet level frames for all the communications. The library I am porting from makes use …

Read More
How to convert DOS/Windows newline (CRLF) to Unix newline (LF) in a Bash script?

How can I programmatically (i.e., not using vi) convert DOS/Windows newlines to Unix? The dos2unix and unix2dos commands are not available on certain systems. How can I emulate these with commands like sed/awk/tr?

Read More