alt Hacker News"portable" used to mean "able to be ported" rather than the "comes automatically ported if you just change compiler options" that it means today
"portable" used to mean "able to be ported" rather than the "comes automatically ported if you just change compiler options" that it means today
All software is portable by that former definition.
When people talked about portable before, they meant code that used an abstraction that was platform agnostic. And that’s how it’s still used today. It’s just we have better abstractions now so our expectations of what is “portable” have gotten stricter.
Eg the P in POSIX (which is nearly 40 years old now) is “portable”. The point of POSIX was to provide common abstractions that one could build against to run on multiple different operating systems. It wasn’t about porting software, it was about preventing people from needing to constantly write platform-specific ports.