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
Using video games as an example, current and last gen Playstations and Xboxs both ran basically the same architectures, so porting games between them basically just consisted of changes to make the games work with their different operating systems and hardware specs.
A PS3 and a Xbox 360 ran on completely different architectures. Making a game for one of them and then altering it to work on the other is still “porting”, but since the architectures are different, there may be some cross compiling needed as well.
Edit: Regarding Assembly, Assembly is simply an extremely low level programming language. It is specific to each CPU architecture, though syntax may be similar or the same across platforms. It’s as close to machine code as you can get without being machine code. Assembly is generally only used when the operating system doesn’t have a particular function that you need, and/or you’re very interested in maximum performance for a particular function. Chrome and Firefox both using Assembly is not particularly noteworthy.
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