I recently started caring about writing portable code. If some asks me, "Hey v0dKA, can you code X for me?", I want to respond immediately with "Sure! Just give me a couple years" instead of "Well, what operating system are you using? Unix? Mac? Oh, that sucks, probably not..." In an effort to realize this wish, I decided to abandon the Windows API entirely and start using wxWidgets, a library designed for just this purpose. I haven't learned about all its caveats yet, but it looks very promising. Looking at all the interfaces it provides shows that it not only does the windowing (GUI) stuff, but also such things as networking (including support for HTTP and FTP), dynamic arrays as well as other containers, HTML parsing, document/view management, file operations, command line parsing, data/time, RTTI, logging features, streams, multithreading, XML, help systems, database support, DLL loading, etc (starting to sound like a commercial). But... if I compile an executable that I built using wxWidgets, does that really mean that I can hand this executable to a Windows user, hand out another copy to a *nix user, and another copy to a Mac user? Is the same executable going to run on all the operating systems? Or must the code be actually compiled on the individual machines in order to run on them? In other words, is it the output file or only the code that is portable across all the platforms?

Quote:Original post by CoyCash
You must recompile it on every machine/OS you wish it to run on.

i.e. you cannot build a windows .exe and expect it to run on linux

I see, thanks.

So how is it usually done if a client asks a coder to make them a program, but their operating systems don't match? In such a case, does the coder have to own the operating system of the client in order to be able to compile the application for the client? Does the coder request that the client download a compiler and ask him to compile it himself (eek)? Or, perhaps, are there special tools for this?

Thanks again for the help.

Quote:Original post by v0dKA
So how is it usually done if a client asks a coder to make them a program, but their operating systems don't match?

It's usually done in a portable language like Java, Python or Perl. Code written in these languages can potentially run on any operating system given that there is an interpreter (or virtual machine) installed.

You'd still be crazy to try to release something for a system it hasn't been tested on, so that doesn't gain you much. Either way you still need access to the target system.

I see, thanks for the comments.

So if I want a portable executable, I would have to use something like C#? Or Visual Basic.NET? Or for that matter, any .NET language?

Or is there still the compiling-on-the-platform requirement? Will using .NET do anything?