Software portability means

An example of software that is not portable would be assembly code, since assembly code is specific to processor type. No software is perfectly portable because all softwares have limitations.

Some programming languages are fairly portable, for example the C language. C compilers are readily available for the majority of operating systems, which in turn makes C programs very portable. This portability of C language programs has resulted in some programmers re-writing their programs and recompiling them in C to make them much more portable. Portability is also used to describe the flexibility of the use of data.

Some file formats are less portable than others. For example, to view files with file formats such as PDF or JPEG, the formats depend on the availability of appropriate software applications. By: Brad Rudisail Contributor. By: Kaushik Pal Contributor.

By: Leah Zitter Contributor. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Decentralized Finance. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. Techopedia Explains Portability. What Does Portability Mean? You don't want to have different behaviours on some platforms, you don't want to waste time adressing enviroment related configs.

Imagine tunning your enviroments every single staging, no dev-ops team wants to deal with unnecessary work just because code is not flexible. For Dev teams, Portable software can be easily used on other platforms. So, if your dev team moves to different enviroment, you don't want to waste time and resources on re-development. They also want too avoid lock-ins on certain libraries or dependencies.

Vertical portability refers to consistency of software throught whole lifecycle, which can be ensured with Infrastructure as code. With good Dependency management , single sourcing and good platform support plan, you can master the Horizontal dimension. This software is implemented on multiple platforms. There are two types of cross-platform software: - the first one requires individual building or compilation for each platform - the second one can be directly run on any platform.

Cross-platform applications can run e. Another you can try is to use platform-independent language for example, while C is great for Windows, on Linux it is not the best option. Should the existing program be ported, or should an equivalent program be redeveloped? Such questions are not always easy to answer. What degree of portability is desired for the various environments? Again, it can be difficult to deal with this and similar questions.

It can be very difficult to determine the cost vs. So, it is possible that the costs exceed the benefits.