Lecture
Cross-platform (cross-platform) software - software that runs on more than one hardware platform and / or operating system. A typical example is software designed to work on Linux and Windows operating systems at the same time.
Most modern high-level programming languages can be called cross-platform. For example, C, C ++, Free Pascal are cross-platform languages at the compilation level, that is, for these languages there are compilers for various platforms. This allows - with proper code quality - not to rewrite the main engine of the program, only special system-dependent parts are changed.
Equally important for cross-platform standardized runtime libraries. In particular, the C library has become the standard (see POSIX). From large cross-platform libraries - Qt, GTK +, FLTK, STL, Boost, OpenGL, SDL, OpenAL, OpenCL.
Even at the dawn of the PC, IBM made its personal computer compatible with CP / M. This allowed to run on it already existing programs.
PHP, ActionScript, Perl, Python, Tcl and Ruby are cross-platform interpreted languages, their interpreters exist for many platforms.
The Java Virtual Machine and .NET runtime environments are also cross-platform, but their input is not source code, but intermediate code. Therefore, programs written in Java and C # can be run under different operating systems without recompiling.
On different operating systems - regardless of how technically achieved work in them - the standard interface elements have different sizes. Therefore, a simple rigid positioning of the interface elements is impossible - under a different OS, they can fit on each other. There are several approaches.
In any case, under other operating systems, at least minimal testing is required, since layout errors are possible.
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Cross platform programming
Terms: Cross platform programming