Eli5 Why softwares need to reprogrammed to work on other operating systems or CPUs?
In: Technology
Computers works basically in layers. From the Bios, then the OS and eventually the programs.
It works quite similarly to a building. The land, the foundation and then the house. You need a foundation that will work with the land you’re trying to live in, and a house that can stand on that foundation.
In programs, it’s mostly that OS can have different functions, or that similar function can work differently. As such let’s imagine that both IOS and WINDOWS have a function called “MAX” that allow you to get the maximum value. But IOS decided that “MAX” works by sending it two values. It then pick the highest of the two. Fast, simple, and can easily be expanded upon. But WINDOWS decided to go a step further. windows’ “MAX” works by sending it between 2 and 50 values. It then pick the highest of the 50. Now, it might seems better because it can go up to 50 values, but since there are more values, the function is more complex and can, in certain cases be slightly slowed. Honestly nothing the average joe will care about, but maybe google and its absurdly massive amount of data will care.
Regardless, both functions are slightly different. So if the program was making use of WINDOWS’ MAX, it need to be adapted to work with IOS.
This is a rough example of the issue. it’s of course not a simple problem of “max”, but these OS are foundation that programs lie on. Quite a few bits of the programs rely on it to work. If you change the OS, you need to make sure that the part that rely on the previous OS works with the new, and change what doesn’t.
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