Porting

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What Does Porting Mean?

Porting is the process of adapting software in an environment for which it was not originally written or intended to execute in. The term is used interchangeably when referring to the changes made to hardware when it has to be made compatible with other environments.

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Techopedia Explains Porting

Software is considered portable when the cost of porting it to a new environment or platform is reasonably less than writing the software from scratch. Software developers often claim their product is portable, implying that it will take little effort for it to work on a customer’s platform. The three preferred platforms are those from Microsoft, Apple and UNIX, making it easier to develop software that is portable. Still, in the embedded system market, porting remains a significant issue. To simplify portability, modern compilers translate to a machine-independent intermediate code.

Porting is also used to refer to the process of converting a computer game to be platform independant.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.