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# Portability
Portable [software](software.md) is software that is easy to [port](port.md) to (make run on) other [platforms](platform.md). Platforms here mean anything that serves as an environment enabling software to run, i.e. [hardware](hardware.md) platforms ([CPUs](cpu.md), [ISAs](isa.md), game consoles, ...), different [operating systems](os.md) vs [bare metal](bare_metal.md), [fantasy consoles](fantasy_console.md) etc. **Portability is an extremely important attribute of [good software](lrs.md)** as it allows us to write the program once and then run it on many different computers with little effort -- without portability we'd be constantly busy rewriting old programs to run on new computers, portability allows us to free our programs from being tied to specific computers and exist abstractly and independently and so become [future proof](future_proof.md). Examples of highly portable programs include [Anarch](anarch.md), [Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection](stppc.md), [SAF](saf.md), [sbase](sbase.md) (suckless) implementation of Unix tools such as [cat](cat.md) and [cmp](cmp.md) etc. (one wisdom coming from [Unix](unix.md) development actually states that portability should be favored even before performance).
Portable [software](software.md) is software that is easy to [port](port.md) to (make run on) other [platforms](platform.md). Platforms here mean anything that serves as an environment enabling software to run, i.e. [hardware](hardware.md) platforms ([CPUs](cpu.md), [ISAs](isa.md), game consoles, ...), different [operating systems](os.md) vs [bare metal](bare_metal.md), [fantasy consoles](fantasy_console.md) etc. **Portability is an extremely important attribute of [good software](lrs.md)** as it allows us to write the program once and then run it on many different computers with little effort -- without portability we'd be constantly busy rewriting old programs to run on new computers, portability allows us to free our programs from being tied to specific computers and exist abstractly and independently and so become [future proof](future_proof.md). Examples of highly portable programs include [Anarch](anarch.md), [Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection](stppc.md), [T3X](t3x.md) language compilers, [SAF](saf.md), [sbase](sbase.md) (suckless) implementation of Unix tools such as [cat](cat.md) and [cmp](cmp.md) etc. (one wisdom coming from [Unix](unix.md) development actually states that portability should be favored even before performance).
**Portability is different from mere [multiplatformness](multiplatform.md)**: multiplatform software simply runs on more than one platform without necessarily being designed with high portability in mind; portable software on the other hand possesses the inherent attribute of being designed so that very little effort is required to make it run on wide range of general platforms. Multiplatformness can be achieved cheaply by using a [bloated](bloat.md) framework such as the Godot engine or [QT](qt.md) framework, however that will not achieve portability; on the contrary it will hurt portability. Portability is achieved through good and careful design, efficient code and avoiding [dependencies](dependency.md) and [bloat](bloat.md).