“Porting” vs “Cross-compiling”

Question

Hey all,

Would someone help me understand the difference between “porting” and “cross-compiling”? I did some googling and YouTubing but it seems some people don’t make a distinction, some do, and some talk about crossing to a different OS and some to a different chip architecture.

PS: I have also read that porting/cross-compiling takes a very long time and can be a hard task – apparently Google Chrome and Firefox both have assembly in them but why was it so important to put assembly in them? It has to be super important given that they knew it would take a long time to port/cross compile to a different chip than the original one right?!

Thanks so much!

Thanks!!

In: Technology

Answer 1

Generally porting creates a separate codebase that modifies the original code to suit the new architecture.
Cross-compiling means a single codebase can be compiled into the new architecture. Differences between the original architecture and the new architecture maybe handled by the cross compiler or conditional compilation code in the codebase.