SoaDMTGguy

What is required to port a program to another operating system then the one it was written for? I am asking for information, so please dont say stuff like "its to hard, dont bother" or anything like that, I just want to know how its done, what needs to be changed, etc.

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FrankenPC

If you are using OS specific source code (like Visual Studio C#.NET code), then you need to take the source code (ascii text) and place it in a compiler environment for the new OS and carefully, line by line, modify the syntax and object calls to reflect what you have at hand. It's PAINFUL if it's code written using libraries specific to the source OS.

That's why JAVA was going to be so great. The source code was agnostic. As long as both OS's had the same JVM installed, in essence, it would work on both machines with little or no tweaking.

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PassMark

It depends on how the code was written to start with. Some programs, like the Apache web server, Perl and PHP interpreters were written from the start to be cross platform. So moving them to a different platform is easy.

Other programs (like many games) are very reliant on a particular operating system and other libraries, like DirectX. Porting these applications can be a huge amount of work.

Programs written scripting languages (like PHP) are trivial to move between Windows and Linux. Programs written in standard C++ using only the standard C libraries are fairly easy to port. But programs that make heavy use of the operating systems API and graphics can be very difficult to move.