GNU Coding Standards - Portability

Portability

The GNU Coding Standards define the issue of portability in this way: portability in the Unix world means 'between Unixes'; in a GNU program this kind of portability is desirable, but not vitally important.

According to the standard, portability problems are very limited as GNU programs are designed to be compiled with one compiler, the GNU C Compiler, and only run on one system, which is the GNU system.

There is one form of portability problem though, and that is the fact that the standard makes it clear that a program should run on different CPU types. The standard says that GNU doesn't and won't support 16-bit systems, but handling all the different 32- and 64-bit systems is absolutely necessary.

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