Portability (computing)

In computing and software engineering, references to portability generally refer to the ability of the software being written to be easily 'translated' to run on various different platforms.

The operating system NetBSD is an open source Unix-like variant that is considered very portable - so much so that NetBSD's homepage proclaims "Of course it runs NetBSD!," a reference to the multitude of computing devices that can run NetBSD

One of the first examples of the implementation of a portable operating system was in the first versions of Unix. Originally, Unix was written in assembly language, but a design decision was made to implement the C programming language and then port Unix to that language. From then on, only the C language itself had to be ported to new platforms, instead of Unix itself.